Carmelo Anthony averaged 28.7 points per game.
This is the the first scoring title of Anthony’s 10-year NBA career. However, weirdly enough, this is not Anthony’s highest scoring average of his career. That came during the 2006-07 season, when he averaged 28.9 points per game for George Karl’s Denver Nuggets. Anthony is the first Knick to win the league scoring title since Bernard King led the league during the 1984-85 season.
Efficiency mavens, of course, will point to a couple of statistics to note that while Anthony’s per-game average will finish higher than Durant’s, that doesn’t mean he’s a superior scorer.
For one thing, Durant will end the season with more total points (2,280, tops in the league) than Anthony (1,920, fifth in the league), the fourth straight year he’ll have led the league in overall scoring, which is something only Wilt Chamberlain and Michael Jordan have done before. (Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and James Harden all scored more overall points than Anthony.) For another, despite playing 14 more games (81, compared to Anthony’s injury-reduced 67), Durant took 56 fewer shots and 80 fewer 3-pointers than Anthony, and finished with significant leads on Anthony in field-goal, 3-point and free-throw percentage.
As a matter of fact, Durant will end the season having made 51 percent of his field goals, 41.6 percent of his long-range tries and a league-leading 90.5 percent of his freebies. That makes him the sixth player since the NBA introduced the 3-point line before the 1979-80 season to join the so-called “50-40-90 Club,” alongside Steve Nash, Larry Bird, Dirk Nowitzki, Mark Price and Reggie Miller.
Congrats to Durant and Anthony on their respective milestones.
AthleticPoetics 