50 Greatest Players in NBA History

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On the 29th of October 1996, NBA commissioner David Stern stood at the Grand Hyatt New York and read out fifty names. The hotel stood on the site of the old Commodore Hotel, the place where the NBA's original charter was signed back in 1946. Fifty years later, the league was honoring itself, and the question it had put to a panel of media members, former players, coaches, and executives was deceptively simple: who were the fifty greatest players in the history of the game?

  The answer would provoke debate for decades. Eleven of the named players were still active at the time. The list would later be assembled in person, almost in full, at the halftime of the 1997 All-Star Game in Cleveland. What made this moment significant was not just the names themselves but the machinery behind them: fifty panelists, a set of rules, and a set of absences that said as much as the inclusions. What criteria guided the vote? Who got left out? And what does a list like this reveal about how a sport remembers itself?

• 2. The Vote and Its Rules

  ›

  Fifty panelists cast the votes, and the NBA organized them into three broad categories. Sixteen were former players voting in the role of players. Thirteen came from the print and broadcast news media. The remaining twenty-one were team representatives, a group that included current and former general managers, head coaches, and executives; of those twenty-one, thirteen were themselves former NBA players.

  One rule shaped the outcome quietly: players were prohibited from voting for themselves. That constraint pushed the process toward collective judgment rather than self-promotion. Only three voting former players, Bill Bradley, Johnny Kerr, and Bob Lanier, were not selected to the team they were helping to choose. The panel was selecting without a positional quota; players were chosen irrespective of the position they played, which meant guards, forwards, and centers competed against each other on a single undivided ballot.

  The fifty selected players had to have played at least a portion of their careers in the NBA, which opened the door to figures who spent time in other leagues as well. The list was not ranked; it was a flat roster of fifty names, which spared the panel the harder argument of whether the first name was better than the fiftieth.

• 3. Continuity with Earlier Teams

  ›

  The 1996 selection was actually the third anniversary team in league history, and the voters showed considerable loyalty to earlier choices. All eleven members of the 35th Anniversary Team were selected again, a sign that the panel viewed those earlier honorees as beyond dispute.

  The 25th Anniversary Team fared slightly differently. Eight of its ten players made the cut, but two did not: Bob Davies and Joe Fulks, both of whom had last played in the 1950s. Their omission pointed to a tension inside any all-time list. Players from the early decades of the game competed against players whose careers had unfolded on television, in color, in front of far larger audiences. The panel's composition, heavy with people who had watched and covered the modern game, may have worked against figures whose legacies lived mainly in box scores and fading newspaper accounts.

  At the moment the list was announced, only one of the fifty players had died: Pete Maravich. The rest were alive to receive the recognition, and all fifty have since been inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

• 4. The Active Eleven

  ›

  Eleven players on the list were still active during the season when the announcement was made. Charles Barkley, Clyde Drexler, Patrick Ewing, Michael Jordan, Karl Malone, Shaquille O'Neal, Hakeem Olajuwon, Robert Parish, Scottie Pippen, David Robinson, and John Stockton were all still playing when their names were called at the Grand Hyatt.

  All eleven have since retired. O'Neal was the last of them to leave the game, retiring at the end of his final season. His career stretched across teams including the Orlando Magic, the Los Angeles Lakers, the Miami Heat, the Phoenix Suns, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and the Boston Celtics, with four championship rings and one regular-season MVP award among his honors.

  The presence of eleven active players on the list gave the 1997 All-Star Game halftime ceremony a particular energy. Forty-seven of the fifty were assembled in Cleveland for that occasion, producing one of the most concentrated gatherings of basketball talent ever photographed. The three who were absent missed a moment that has not been replicated since.

• 5. Records Carried by the Fifty

  ›

  The statistical range across the fifty players is staggering. At one end, Bill Russell won eleven championships with the Boston Celtics, a figure that no player before or since has matched. He also won five MVP awards and made twelve All-Star appearances over his career, spending all of it with the Celtics.

  Magic Johnson, who played for the Los Angeles Lakers, finished his career with ten thousand one hundred and forty-one assists, the highest assist total among the fifty. His three Finals MVP awards and five championships came across a Lakers run that defined the 1980s. Michael Jordan won six championships with the Chicago Bulls and won the Finals MVP award in all six of those series, a perfect record across six attempts. His five regular-season MVP awards placed him second among the fifty only to Russell's five, which Jordan matched exactly.

  Wilt Chamberlain's career rebound total of twenty-three thousand nine hundred and twenty-four stands as the highest figure on the list by a wide margin. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar finished with thirty-eight thousand three hundred and eighty-seven points, the highest scoring total among the fifty. Abdul-Jabbar won six regular-season MVP awards and six championships across his time with the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers.

• 6. The Coaches and Teams

  ›

  Running alongside the player selection was a separate vote for the Top 10 Coaches in NBA History, compiled exclusively by media members who regularly covered the league. All ten coaches named were still alive at the time of the announcement, and five of them were actively coaching: Bill Fitch, Phil Jackson, Don Nelson, Pat Riley, and Lenny Wilkens.

  Of the ten, only Don Nelson had never won a championship as a coach, though he had won five as a player. Lenny Wilkens held a distinction the others did not: he appeared on both the coaches list and the players list, the only person to receive recognition in both categories. Phil Jackson, who coached two of the ten best teams, had actually been under contract with the New York Knicks as a player during their 1969-70 championship season but did not play that year while recovering from spinal fusion surgery.

  The Top 10 Teams list revealed how concentrated greatness had been across the league's history. Only six of the thirty NBA franchises had a team named. The Boston Celtics, the Chicago Bulls, the Los Angeles Lakers, and the Philadelphia 76ers each placed two teams on the list. The ten teams combined to average sixty-six wins per season, and each one won a championship. The 1995-96 Chicago Bulls held the best single-season record in NBA history at the time of the announcement, finishing seventy-two and ten.