Carmelo Anthony

Carmelo Anthony arrived in the NBA in 2003 — as a Syracuse freshman who had just won an NCAA championship, in a draft class alongside LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh — and spent the next two decades proving that pure scoring ability could function as a foundation for sustained excellence even without a championship to anchor the résumé.

His placement at tenth on the all-time scoring list with 28,289 career points is the clearest measure of his output. Anthony was a scorer in the fullest sense: his footwork in the post, his pull-up game from the mid-range, and his ability to create separation from virtually any position on the floor made him one of the most consistently productive offensive players of his era. His scoring title in 2012-13 (28.7 ppg) came as a 29-year-old operating at the peak of what isolation offense could produce.

His Olympic record separates him from most contemporaries on an international stage: Anthony won three gold medals with USA Basketball (2008, 2012, 2016) — the most by any player in the history of the U.S. men's national team. That record reflects both his longevity and the esteem in which coaching staffs held his offensive skill set even as the league around him moved toward higher-pace, three-point-centric systems.