TODAY’S SPORTSTAT — Pelicans’ Davis is compiling some eye-opening stats
By JERRY TAPP
New Orleans Pelicans big man Anthony Davis celebrated his 25th birthday on Sunday by collecting his first triple-double in the NBA. He had 25 points, 11 rebounds and a career-high 10 blocks in his team’s loss to Utah.
In the games leading up to his 25th birthday, Davis accumulated 9,125 points and 4,044 career rebounds. His 9,125 career points before his 25th birthday are the seventh most in NBA history. LeBron James tops this category with 13,927 career points.
Following are the Top 10 players in most career points before the age of 25.
LeBron James, 13,927
Kevin Durant, 12,258
Carmelo Anthony, 10,768
Kobe Bryant, 10,658
Tracy McGrady, 10,420
Shaquille O’Neal, 9,208
Anthony Davis, 9,125
Bob McAdoo, 8,960
Dwight Howard, 8,936
Gilbert Arenas, 8,445
Davis also became only the fourth player in NBA history to reach 8,000 career points and 4,000 career rebounds before the age of 25. The others: Shaquille O’Neal, Dwight Howard and Kevin Garnett.
Davis and Garnett are the only two players in NBA history to have 8,000 points, 4,000 rebounds, 700 assists, 500 steals and 500 blocked shots before their 25th birthday.
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Jerry Tapp
Jerry Tapp is a freelance writer from Racine, WI with a major concentration on sports statistics and numbers that define sports teams and players. He began his foray into sports stats-focused writing as a regular contributor to the “Numbers” column in Inside Sports magazine in the mid-1980’s and then began writing a weekly “Stats on Tapp” column for the Racine Journal Times. That column was eventually nationally syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate. He later wrote sports stats items for the Washington Post under the “Stat of the Day” heading. After launching his blog, www.statsontapp.com in 2011, Jerry turned his sports stats attention to sports websites. He wrote regularly for Bleacher Report, BallHyped, football.com and Heavy.com. Today he keeps busy writing weekly columns of stats-centric articles for three sports websites, Today’s Pigskin (NFL), Today’s Knuckleball (MLB) and Today’s Fastbreak (NBA), and as a monthly contributor to the Milwaukee Brewers “GameDay” publication that is distributed to fans attending games at Miller Park.