I'm also an avid basketball fan and last night was Game 7 of the NBA Finals. I was pulling for Golden State, mostly because my Celtics were sent home long ago and I've enjoyed watching the Warriors play excellent ball the past two years. They looked headed for a second straight championship after a historic 73-win regular season. But the LeBron James-led Cleveland Cavaliers fought back from the brink of elimination and won the series last night in a great back-and-forth contest.
In honor of the Cavs winning a championship for their city for the first time in any sport since 1964, here's a song I find perfectly fitting for the moment:
Given the phenomenal performance by LeBron during this series, there's already been a lot of discussion on sports talk shows about his place in NBA history. While this has nothing to do with the song, I thought I'd add my ranking of the best players of all-time since I'm sure millions of people are yearning for it.
A quick preface is needed however. My rankings follow the approach outlined by Bill Simmons in his immense The Book of Basketball which I consider essential reading if you're going to have a valid opinion about basketball greatness. His philosophy is this in a nutshell: to be a great basketball player requires more than great skill or athletic talent. It requires understanding that ultimate greatness is found in making others around you better. He uses the term "The Secret of Basketball" to label it. Basketball is a team game at its core and requires extraordinary unselfishness as well as extraordinary individual skillfulness. As someone who played high school and college ball and also later coached, I couldn't agree more with Simmons' conclusions.
So this ranking isn't based strictly on who would win one-on-one at their peak. It takes into account their greatness within their era and assesses the extent to which they embraced the Secret and combined it with exceptional basketball skill and talent.
1. MJ - for much of his career, Michael didn't totally get the Secret. Phil Jackson helped change that however and unleashed a basketball monster.
2. Bill Russell - the greatest winner in the history of team sports. College, Olympics, and the NBA. He wasn't the greatest physical specimen, though he had talent. What set him apart was how he mastered the psychological warfare and over and over again conquered better individual players (and teams).
3. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - All-time leading scorer with incredible durability. I may have put him #2 but he was just enough of a diva at times and was a little overly sensitive to the extent I have to penalize him just a bit.
4. LeBron James - I had him here before this series, but I didn't think he'd ever climb any higher. Now, even a spot at #1 is in play depending on how the rest of his career goes. He does it all as a good rebounder, great scorer, dominating defender and exceptional facilitator.
5. Magic Johnson - A consummate winner who changed the game for point guards. The leader of 5 championship teams.
6. Larry Bird - He is my favorite player ever, but he wasn't healthy long enough to be considered better than Magic. In the public consciousness, he might be slipping into 'underrated' territory. He and Magic both - because stats for their era don't look quite as good as we might expect today.
7. Tim Duncan - He's a machine. He's a model of consistency and shows what excellent fundamentals will do along with a total buy-in to the team concept. He's really a center but whatever, he belongs this high.
8. Wilt Chamberlain - the most talented player ever, but fell short of fully understanding The Secret. And I don't want to hear that he played on inferior teams to the Celtics. Simmons picks that argument apart definitively in his book.
9. Kobe Bryant - Only MJ and Russell can rival his intense competitiveness. That said, a lot of it was "me-focused", even as he was winning rings without Shaq.
10. Jerry West - Truly is underrated because of his inability to beat the 60's Celtics but his overall legacy is truly special.
11. Oscar Robertson - has great stats, but accumulated them in an era where especially rebounds were highly inflated (many more bad shots taken by shooters who were overall mediocre). I rely on Simmons' research here too, because there is significant evidence he was a prickly teammate who didn't make others better as much as you'd think.
12./13. Hakeem Olajuwon and Shaq - In high school our coach kept 13 varsity players in an unusual move allowing me to make the team. I'm doing the same because it's hard to differentiate these dominant big men. Hakeem could do it all and Shaq was an unstoppable force when he had to turn it on. They deserve mention within this tier of players as their accomplishments earn them a spot at this table.
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