Making an All-Star team isn't easy, but you'd think scoring 15,000 or even close to 20,000 career points would be enough to get there at least once. Somehow, that wasn't the case for a pretty surprising group of NBA scorers.
Some had their best years in loaded conferences, others spent most of their careers as second options or coming off the bench, but all of them kept putting up points for years without ever getting that All-Star selection.
CJ McCollum and Tobias Harris are still adding to their totals while searching for that milestone, while guys like Rudy Gay , Jason Terry , and Jamal Crawford retired with huge scoring numbers but no All-Star selection. So let's rank the 10 highest-scoring players in NBA history who never made an All-Star team.
Sam Perkins is probably the name on this list that surprises me the most, because he never even averaged 16.0 points in a season, but he basically never went away either. He played 17 NBA seasons and 1,286 games, finished with 15,324 points and 7,666 rebounds, and averaged 11.9 points and 6.0 rebounds for his career. His best statistical years came early with the Mavericks , including 15.4 points and 8.6 rebounds in 1985-86, and he made the All-Rookie team after Dallas took him No. 4 overall in 1984.
His career also had way more team success than the zero All-Star selections would suggest. Perkins reached the NBA Finals with three different teams, the Lakers in 1991, the SuperSonics in 1996, and the Pacers in 2000, and played 167 career playoff games. By the time he retired, he'd also made 849 threes at 36.2% for his career, pretty unusual production for a big man from his era. He never had a clear All-Star peak, but 17 seasons, three Finals trips, and more than 15,000 points is a hell of a career anyway.
If anybody here has an award résumé that makes up for never being an All-Star, it's probably Lou Williams . He retired with 15,593 points across 17 seasons and won Sixth Man of the Year three times, putting him in a tiny group of players who've dominated that award. His career average was only 13.9 points, but that number hides how good his prime actually was because he spent so much of his career coming off the bench.
The best version came in 2017-18 with the Clippers , when Williams put up 22.6 points and 5.3 assists over 79 games and won his second Sixth Man award. He followed that with another 20.0-point season and won the award again in 2018-19, so there was a real stretch where he was producing All-Star scoring numbers without technically being a starter. Williams never got the selection, but three Sixth Man trophies, five seasons at 18.0-plus points, and more than 15,500 career points tells the story much better anyway. He wasn't just a bench scorer who had a couple of hot years, he did it for basically two decades.
Derek Harper's career is probably much better than most people who didn't watch the 1980s and 1990s realize. Across 16 seasons, he scored 16,006 points, handed out 6,577 assists, and made All-Defensive Second Team twice, with most of his prime coming as the Mavericks' starting point guard. Dallas even retired his No. 12 years later, so he meant more to that franchise than the zero beside his All-Star total says.
His best stretch started in 1986-87, when he averaged 16.0 points, 7.9 assists, and 2.2 steals on 50.1% from the field while earning his first All-Defensive selection. Harper eventually reached 18.0-plus points in multiple seasons and later became the Knicks ' starting point guard during their run to the 1994 NBA Finals. That's what I like about his case here: he wasn't somebody who reached 16,000 because he played forever at the end of a bench, he had a long prime as a starting guard, made major playoff runs, and had real defensive recognition. The All-Star appearances are really the only major thing missing.
The crazy thing about Andre Miller finishing with 16,278 points is that he was even better as a passer. He played 17 seasons, finished with 8,524 assists and 1,546 steals, and retired as one of the highest assist producers in league history, all while averaging 12.5 points and 6.5 assists across 1,304 games. He's also the only player in NBA history with at least 16,000 points, 8,000 assists, and 1,500 steals without an All-Star appearance.
If there was one year when Miller had a real case, it was 2001-02 with the Cavaliers. He averaged 16.5 points, 10.9 assists, 4.7 rebounds, and 1.6 steals over 81 games and actually led the entire NBA in assists. That's a pretty good individual season, but Cleveland went 29-53, and there was basically no reason for voters to give a bad team's point guard the benefit of the doubt. He never got closer statistically after that, but the longevity was ridiculous, and the fact that a guy with more than 8,500 assists also scored over 16,000 points makes his career a lot bigger than just "solid point guard for a long time."
If there's one player from the last decade who could've sneaked into an All-Star Game without anybody thinking it was crazy, Tobias Harris is pretty high on that list. He's entering his 16th season with 16,440 career points, 6,292 rebounds, and averages of 15.9 points and 6.1 rebounds over 1,033 games, and for most of his prime he was basically sitting somewhere between very good starter and borderline star.
The season I go back to is 2018-19 with the Clippers. Before getting traded to the 76ers , Harris averaged 20.9 points, 7.9 rebounds, and 2.7 assists while shooting 49.6% from the field and an insane 43.4% from three across 55 games. That's absolutely the type of stat line that can get somebody into an All-Star Game, but the West was loaded, and he missed out again. Harris never really had a much bigger individual year after that, but he kept stacking 15-to-20-point seasons and now finds himself sixth on this entire list. He's with the Spurs entering 2026-27 too, so 17,000 points should be very realistic before he's done.
This is where I start thinking the zero All-Star selections look genuinely ridiculous. CJ McCollum enters 2026-27 with 16,838 points, career averages of 19.5 points and 3.8 assists, a Most Improved Player award and, most importantly, 10 different seasons averaging at least 20.0 points per game. Nobody in NBA history has had more 20-PPG seasons without making an All-Star team.
His peak came in 2020-21, when he put up 23.1 points and 4.7 assists while shooting 40.2% from three, but you could honestly pick several years where the numbers looked good enough. He averaged 23.0 points in 2016-17 on 48.0% from the field and 42.0% from three, spent years as Damian Lillard 's co-star, and had already proved himself in the playoffs, including Portland 's 2019 Western Conference Finals run.
The problem was always the same: Western Conference guard spots were brutal. Curry, Harden , Westbrook , Paul, Lillard, Thompson, and eventually Doncic were all around during his prime. McCollum wasn't some one-year snub, he basically spent a decade being close and never got the call.
Rudy Gay's career is a good reminder that people forget really good scorers fast once they retire. He finished with 17,642 points across 1,120 games and 17 seasons, averaging 15.8 points and 5.6 rebounds for his career, but his prime numbers were much better than that. He first crossed 20.0 points in only his second season, putting up 20.1 points and 6.2 rebounds in 2007-08, then stayed around that scoring level for years.
His actual career high came much later with the Kings in 2014-15, when he averaged 21.1 points, 5.9 rebounds, and 3.7 assists while shooting 45.5% from the field. Gay had eight straight seasons averaging at least 17.0 points from 2007-08 through 2014-15, yet none turned into an All-Star selection.
A lot of that came down to competition and team success, because his prime overlapped with an absurd era of forwards, and many of his best statistical seasons came on teams nowhere near the top of the standings. Still, 17,642 points isn't some borderline career. Gay spent almost a decade producing like a high-level scorer, he just never got the award that usually comes with it.
Jason Terry probably cares less about missing the All-Star Game than almost anybody here because he has something much better on his bag: an NBA championship where he was actually a major part of winning it. Terry finished his 19-year career with 18,881 points, won Sixth Man of the Year in 2008-09, and then helped the Mavericks win the 2011 title, giving him career accomplishments that plenty of actual All-Stars never reached.
He was also a lot closer to traditional star production early in his career than people sometimes remember. In only his second season, Terry averaged 19.7 points, 4.9 assists, and 1.3 steals while shooting 39.5% from three for the Hawks , then followed it with 19.3 points and 5.7 assists the next year. Later, his role changed in Dallas, but the scoring never disappeared, and he averaged 18.0 points in the 2011 NBA Finals before scoring 27 in the championship-clinching Game 6.
So yeah, technically no All-Star appearances, but almost 19,000 points, a Sixth Man trophy, and a ring as one of the main scorers on the champion Mavericks makes Terry's career pretty hard to complain about.
Eddie Johnson might be the player younger fans learn the most about from this list, because 19,202 career points with zero All-Star selections sounds almost impossible. He lasted 17 seasons, averaged 16.0 points for his career, and had a six-year stretch early on where he was consistently one of the Kings' main scorers, including a career-best 22.9 points per game in 1984-85.
The best part is that his career didn't fall apart once he left that role. At 29, Johnson joined the Suns and averaged 21.5 points per game off the bench in 1988-89, won Sixth Man of the Year, and helped Phoenix reach the Western Conference Finals. He'd later play in two more Conference Finals, one with the SuperSonics and another with the Rockets, and kept scoring well into his 30s.
So this wasn't just somebody who piled up numbers on bad Kings teams and disappeared. Johnson had a real prime, won a major individual award, contributed to contenders, and still somehow finished only 217 points below No. 1 on this list. For a No. 29 pick, 19,202 points is an absurd return.
Jamal Crawford being No. 1 feels completely right because this category basically describes his whole career. He played 20 seasons, scored 19,419 points, won Sixth Man of the Year three times, and finished with career averages of 14.6 points and 3.4 assists, even though only 433 of his 1,327 appearances came as a starter.
And Crawford actually did have a stretch where the raw scoring looked like All-Star production. His best season came with the Knicks in 2007-08, when he averaged 20.6 points and 5.0 assists over 80 games, while he also had three other seasons at 19.0-plus points and remained a double-digit scorer until he was almost 40. The awards eventually became his legacy instead, winning Sixth Man in 2010, 2014, and 2016, and by retirement he'd scored more points than every non-All-Star in league history.
Nearly 20,000 career points without one selection sounds crazy, but Crawford also became one of the defining sixth men of his generation, so his career ended up having its own kind of recognition anyway.
