Pitt Basketball: Ashton Gibbs Reaches 1,000 Point-Milestone

With a three-pointer in Saturday's game against DePaul, Ashton Gibbs became the 38th player in Pitt history to top the 1,000-point mark in career scoring. 1,000 points is a fairly significant achievement, but Gibbs has the opportunity to do much more.

If Gibbs returns for his senior season, which I anticipate (though, I also anticipated DeJuan Blair returning as well), he has a chance to finish among Pitt's all-time greats. If he continues on the same pace he's been on last year and this year, depending on the number of games he plays, obviously, Gibbs could finish in the neighborhood of 1,700 points.

That would place him in Pitt's top ten in scoring. If Pitt makes a few deep tournament runs, Gibbs could have a shot at getting to the top five, possibly reaching Don Hennon's mark of 1,841.

I've always said that scoring records in college, while not meaningless, can be very misleading. Many times, a school's best players leave college early for the NBA. So a college's all-time scoring list doesn't always reflect the best players necessarily - just the ones that stuck around for three or four years.

But that aside, if Gibbs sticks around and puts another season together of scoring 16-18 points, that fifth place mark could be in reach. The bigger question is, where would that place Gibbs in the minds of Pitt fans? Is that a career worthy of having his number retired? Unless he does something special like helping Pitt get to a National Championship, I'm guessing probably not. Sam Young currently ranks fourth with 1,884 and Larry Harris is 3rd with 1,914 and heither player has his jersey retired.

Still, hard to say that Ashton hasn't had a great career.