Everybody’s obsessed with LeBron hitting the 30,000 point mark in his career and Kevin Durant hitting 20,000 and Carmelo hitting 25,000 and all this other lame garbage that I don’t care about. The real scoring milestone that people should be paying attention to is Trevor Ariza getting to 10,000 career points. Right now he’s only 250-ish points away.
He would already have it if you could count playoff points towards the total. But you can’t, so Ariza will have to average around 13 points per game for the rest of the season to make it, if he even cares about hitting 10,000 this year. He could just postpone it for the first game of next season when he could very well be playing for a different team. Then they can have a big celebration and he can be the center of attention in a way that he can never be on the Rockets.
The question then becomes, can he reach 15,000 before he retires? He’s already 32 years old and it’s taken him 14 years to score the first 10,000. He would have to maintain his scoring rate while his body weakens and his role diminishes. But the one thing we’ve learned with Ariza is that he plays way better when it’s a contract year. So, if he wants to score 5,000 total points in the next six or so years, he should sign a series of one-year deals that keep him at maximum motivation.