NBA: Houston Rockets at Portland Trail Blazers
USATSI

You likely know by now that Damian Lillard dropped 71 points on the Houston Rockets on Sunday night. He did it in just 39 minutes with a total shot distance of 420 feet, both unparalleled feats in NBA history -- or in the case of the latter, since the start of the shot-location tracking era (1996-97). 

If you're interested in more of the crazy numbers to come out of Lillard's performance, check out our Sam Quinn's piece, which notes, among other statistical items, that Lillard is just the second player in history, joining Kobe Bryant, to put up two 60-point games in two separate seasons (2022-23, 2019-20), which I can't totally wrap my head around. 

Have you any idea how hard it is to score 60 points in an NBA game? LeBron James, now officially the single greatest scorer in history, has only done it one time in his career. Lillard has done it twice just this season and five times total. 

Speaking of besting LeBron, Lillard's 71-point outburst on Sunday was the 15th time he has scored at least 50 points in a game, one more than LeBron's 14. 

In other words, Lillard now has more 50-, 60-, and 70-point games than the NBA's all-time leading scorer, and he has amassed these marks in 10 fewer seasons than James. 

The only active player with more 50-point games than Lillard's 15 is James Harden, who has 23. But the most points Harden has ever scored in a single game is 61. Lillard has hit that mark twice and bested it once. 

Stephen Curry's career high is 62, short of Lillard,'s 71, and his 11 50-point games also trail Lillard's total, as do Kevin Durant's nine. 

All of this is to say, we're getting to a point where we kind of have to start talking about Lillard as one of the greatest scorers of all time. In terms of high-end ceiling, nobody has proven more explosive, and even from an average standpoint, he's up there with the best of the best over the last half-decade. 

He made the NBA's 75th anniversary team. That was deserved. But this guy is far from done. He's 32 years old. At present, he has 19,026 career points. If he were to play six more years, at just 60 games per season, at his career average of 25 points per game, which, if you look at his career marks, is actually conservative on all fronts, he would go down as the NBA's eighth all-time leading scorer, one spot ahead of Shaquille O'Neal. 

Fact is, 30,000 career points is legitimately in play for Lillard, who is likely going to average well above 25 points for the foreseeable future. At present, only seven guys in history have cleared that bar. 

It's pretty crazy how great Lillard has become. We've gone through the evolutions of the classic debates with him. For years he wasn't even regarded as a lock All-Star. He's only been first-team All-NBA once? He's never won MVP. 

We've tried to keep our Lillard conversations outside the historical realm, preferring head-to-head water-cooler debates like whether he's better than Kyrie Irving or Russell Westbrook, which shouldn't even be debated anymore. There was some pushback at Lillard being named one of the 75 greatest players of all time, but there shouldn't have been. We're just still not quite comfortable putting Lillard in an all-time context. 

We should be. It's happening relatively quietly up in Portland, but the simple truth is that Damian Lillard is becoming one of the greatest players, and certainly one of the greatest scorers, this game has ever seen. The numbers don't lie, and he's far from done amassing them.