The Greatest NBA Players of All Time — Settled by Vote

Four rings across three franchises is the argument, and it is a strong one: Miami in 2012 and 2013, Cleveland in 2016, the Lakers in 2020. The 2016 Finals makes the case by itself — down 3-1 to a 73-win Golden State team, he answered with a Game 7 triple-double of 27 points, 11 rebounds and 11 assists, and chased down Andre Iguodala for the block that decided it.

Six MVPs is still more than anyone else has won, and the skyhook is why nobody could do much about it. On 5 April 1984 against Utah he took a pass from Magic Johnson and dropped one over the 7-foot-4 Mark Eaton for his 38,388th point, passing Wilt Chamberlain. College basketball had already banned the dunk in 1967, partly to slow him down.

Putting him third will annoy people, which is fair — he went six-for-six in the Finals, won Finals MVP every single time, and his 30.1 career scoring average has never been beaten. The last one was the cleanest: 14 June 1998, Game 6 in Utah, 45 points, a strip on Karl Malone in the post, then a jumper with 5.2 seconds left. He never played for Chicago again.

Eleven championships in thirteen seasons is the number that ends most arguments, and he won the last two as player-coach, the first Black head coach to win an NBA title. Game 7 of the 1969 Finals in Los Angeles, at 35 years old, he pulled down 21 rebounds in a 108-106 win over the Lakers and retired immediately afterward. Blocks were not an official statistic in his era.

Rookie point guards do not usually start at center in a title-clinching Finals game, but Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's sprained ankle left no choice on 16 May 1980 in Philadelphia. He put up 42 points, 15 rebounds and seven assists, went 14-for-14 from the free-throw line, and took Finals MVP. His career average of 11.2 assists a game remains the highest anyone has managed.

No film of the 100-point game survives — only a fourth-quarter radio recording and 4,124 people in Hershey, Pennsylvania on 2 March 1962. That same season he averaged 50.4 points and 48.5 minutes a night, which is more minutes than a game officially contains. The league widened the lane from 12 feet to 16 and banned dunking from the free-throw line largely to make him stoppable.

Nineteen years, one franchise, five titles, and a record 15 All-Defensive selections that nobody brings up because the man refused to be interesting on camera. Game 6 of the 2003 Finals is the tell: 21 points, 20 rebounds, 10 assists and eight blocks against New Jersey, two blocks short of something that has never happened in a Finals game.

Three straight MVPs from 1984 to 1986 puts him in a club of three, with Russell and Chamberlain. The night that explains him best was 12 March 1985 in New Orleans, where he dropped 60 points on Atlanta, 22 of 36 from the floor and 15 of 16 from the line. It is still the Boston Celtics' single-game franchise record.

Backboard supports had to be reinforced league-wide for the 1993-94 season because he kept destroying them, which tells you roughly what guarding him was like. Game 6 of the 2000 Finals against Indiana was the peak: 41 points and 12 rebounds to close out the first of three straight titles, capping a series in which he averaged 38 points a night.

Charlotte drafted him 13th in 1996 and traded him to Los Angeles for Vlade Divac, a transaction that aged about as badly as any in league history. On 22 January 2006 he scored 81 points against Toronto, still the third-highest single-game total ever recorded. The Lakers retired both 8 and 24, because the two halves of his career barely resemble one another.

Winning MVP, Defensive Player of the Year and Finals MVP in a single season has happened exactly once, in 1993-94, and it happened to him. Game 7 against the Knicks on 22 June 1994 finished the job — 25 points, 10 rebounds, seven assists, three blocks, and Houston's first championship. He retired as the league's all-time shot-blocker with 3,830, a mark still standing.

The single-season three-point record was 286, his own, until he made 402 in 2015-16 — the year he was voted the first unanimous MVP in league history and Golden State won 73 games. He passed Ray Allen for the career record at Madison Square Garden on 14 December 2021, then became the first player to reach 4,000 threes in March 2025. Seventh pick, 2009.

Averaging a triple-double for a full season sounds like a modern stunt until you learn he did it in 1961-62 — 30.8 points, 12.5 rebounds and 11.4 assists across 79 games — and that nobody repeated it for 55 years. His other legacy is legal: the antitrust suit he filed as players' union president in 1970 held up the ABA merger and produced free agency.

Nine trips to the Finals, eight of them losses, and one award that captures the whole problem: the first Finals MVP ever handed out, in 1969, went to a player whose team had just lost. On 29 April 1970 he tied Game 3 with a shot from roughly 60 feet that counted for two, because the three-point line did not exist yet. New York won in overtime anyway.

Taken 41st in 2014 while a Taco Bell commercial ran over the announcement, he now holds three MVPs, a championship, and something no player had ever done: in 2025-26 he led the entire league in both rebounds and assists per game, at 12.9 and 10.7. On Christmas Day 2025 he put up 56 points, 16 rebounds and 15 assists against Minnesota, 18 of them in overtime.