Vince Carter Passes Adrian Dantley for 25th on NBA All-Time Scoring List

Dallas Mavericks shooting guard Vince Carter achieved another career milestone on Friday night, passing Adrian Dantley for 25th place on the NBA's all-time scoring list, per Mavs Insider's Earl K. Snead:

Carter scored the fateful points on a three-pointer during the second quarter of the Mavericks' game against the Phoenix Suns.

The 16-year veteran has been a valuable contributor off the bench for Dallas this season. This is his third season with the club, which he joined during the 2011 offseason as a free agent. Before that, he played for the Phoenix Suns and Orlando Magic.

But it was Carter's first two stops that continue to define his career. He played the first six full seasons of his career for the Toronto Raptors, winning the legendary 2000 Slam Dunk Contest and leading the franchise to its best-ever playoff result: Game 7 of the 2001 Eastern Conference semifinals.

Dantley, meanwhile, is an interesting character in NBA History—a Hall of Fame shooting guard who was recently working as a crossing guard near Eastern Middle School in Silver Spring, Md. because he didn't want to pay for his own health insurance, per Deadspin's Dave McKenna. 

The 6'5" post scoring whiz averaged 24.3 points per game over a 14-year career that saw him play for seven teams. He was the leading scorer on the '87-'88 Detroit Pistons team, which lost the Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA Finals, but was traded in-season the next year, just months before Detroit would win its first title.

Dantley made quite a few enemies over the years, per McKenna. When the Utah Jazz traded the forward, the team's president at the time, Dave Checketts, famously remarked, "We knew we had to get rid of him and we were never so happy to get rid of a guy in the history of the franchise."

In a way, that puts him on par with Carter, who made quite a few enemies when he essentially quit on the Raptors before forcing a trade to the New Jersey Nets in the 2004-05 season.

So will Carter eventually join Dantley in the Hall of Fame? It should be noted that no eligible player in the top 25 in scoring has ever been left out of the Hall. No matter how you feel about Carter, his body of work suggests that he will certainly wind up in Springfield at the end of his storied career.

*All statistics courtesy of Basketball-Reference.