My April 2018 Top 36 Players of All-Time -- Background, What Makes a Player Great?

I know that I have gone over this before, but rather than look it up and just regurgitate it, I thought since I am taking a new look in 2018 (versus my 2015 list) that I would try to evaluate the elements of what makes a truly "great" player and why one "great" player is better than another.


Traits of a Great NBA/ABA Player


1) Recognized In His Time as a Great Player -- Look, we have awards for a reason.  Every year people are given the opportunity to vote for the best defender, the best rookie, the best 5 guys (all-NBA), the best 15 guys (three all-NBA teams) and the best 24-30 guys (the all-star games and injury replacements).  Why do we do this?  In part it is because the we wanted to recognize for ourselves and for future generations "who are/were the best guys?"


Strengths - it is an evaluation made at the actual time of play; it is made independently of the teams or players; it can be assessed across generations (all-NBA is all-NBA)


Weaknesses -- There can be politics and the fact that guys who start as all-star or all-NBA tend to hang on a bit too long.  It also favors players with good PR, players on good teams and big markets and tends to get distorted when you are playing either against terrible competition at your position or at all-time high levels of play at your position.


2) Raw Numbers and Per-Game Numbers -- While there will always be those out there who say "well, sure, Wilt got 50 a game, his team shot 190 times a game" what raw numbers and per game figures can tell us, if properly reviewed, is who put up numbers at the top of the league and how far above their competition they were.  Example - Wilt's 27 rebounds a night is less impressive because Russell was very close behind, but Wilt's 50 points a night is extremely impressive because no one at the time (or even today) ever approached it.


Strengths - see above


Weaknesses - you have to look a little deeper; for example, Russell Westbrook's 30/11/10 season cannot be reviewed and evaluated without some mention of the fact that his Usage Rate was almost 42%.  Certainly anyone physically capable of a 42 Usage would put up big numbers.  I mean, Kobe could have gone 40-7-7 some years if you just gave him the green light and said "jack it every time come hell or high water."


3) Longevity - Played a Long Time at a High Level -- this is a tough one for me.  I see it used against players like Sidney Moncrief and Paul Westphal to keep them out of the Hall of Fame.  On the other hand, I see it used by fans of Paul Pierce to say he is a top 25 all-time player (Spoiler Alert, he is not).


Was Sandy Koufax a better pitcher than Don Sutton?  Certainly.  Did he have a better career?  What exactly does that mean?  How can you say?  That is why longevity is the hardest of the components to base your judgments upon.  Was a 7 year Sandy Koufax as good of a pitcher as, say, Walter Johnson?  Certainly not - Johnson was as dominant and better over a lengthier period of time.  So, looking at the issue for judging players is worthwhile.  It is just difficult to assess what weight to give the factor.  Should Robert Parish be ranked higher as a player than Grant Hill?  I guess I'd say yes.  But I can certainly see the argument for no. 


This category is also an extremely important one in evaluating the careers of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson.   They were both supremely great NBA players.  Larry Bird had 9 great seasons.  Magic Johnson had 11.  Now, we are not evaluating Gayle Sayers here.  That is a lot of years.  But when you are fighting in the top 20 spots of all-time, some consideration has to be give for guys like Wilt and Kareem playing at a high level basically forever.


George Mikan is another player - 6 otherworldly seasons.  Same comment on Neil Johnston - 6 great seasons.  Is Neil Johnston a better player than Artis Gilmore or Moses Malone? 


Strengths and Weaknesses - see above




4) Playoff and Championship Success -- as people will remind you who do not like this category - basketball is a team game.  If you have a terrible coach and terrible teammates, it is gonna be pretty hard to succeed at the highest level.  Other people will remind you (for example, fans of Bill Russell) that there is only one reason to play the games, and that being "better" means you always win.


There are certainly obvious limits to this theory - was Robert Horry (7 titles) a better player than Charles Barkley, Karl Malone and John Stockton (0 total titles)?  No.  Reggie Miller?  No. Is Frank Ramsey one of the greatest players of all-time?  No. Does Dirk Nowtizki's 1 title in 2011 change your perception of him?  It may.  Does it bother me that Isiah Thomas (whom I do not care for) made the NBA Finals three consecutive years and won twice?  Yes, that causes me a lot of cognitive dissonance.  Does Allen Iverson's reaching the Finals matter?  What if he had won a title, rather than losing to the Lakers with his far-inferior team?  Do I give Rick Barry a lot of credit for the Warriors title he won?  I absolutely do.


The strength of this category is it is pretty black-and-white - you either won or you did not.  And there is no question that in competitive sports you play for titles.


The weakness of the category is that just judging titles does not answer the question of who was responsible for the title, whether his team would have been good/won anyway, what the person did in the Finals, etc.




5) The Eye Test  -- I have learned from being on Twitter that there is "eye test" Twitter and "analytics" Twitter and you are supposed to choose one and rip the shit out of the other.  I have always said that I can evaluate any NBA player if you allow me to watch him play for 20 consecutive games in person.  That is the #1 way to evaluate a player.  Watching a player play live, you can judge his size, speed, coordination, court vision, effort level, how "dominant" he is versus other players, things he can do that you have never seen before, his leadership, his composure (or lack thereof).


When people evaluate players in their own mind, they generally first think of this.  I will never forget seeing Shaq play at the 1991 Olympic Festival - there were a lot of big guys there and a lot of very talented players (Penny, Jimmy Jackson).  Shaq's size and speed and agility was just insane.  Watch Jordan play - unbelievably fast, unbelievably decisive.  Watch LeBron play - incredibly fast, incredibly large, stunning passer.  Watch Kobe - relentless.  Watch a young Dwyane Wade - he could literally extend the height of the ball while in the air, effectively jumping twice in one jump.  Vince Carter in games would toss the ball off the board or rim in the halfcourt set because he knew he could jump up and dunk it before anyone else could reach it.


Strengths -- as I said, the truest way to evaluate a player


Weaknesses - unless you are incredibly lucky, you won't see most guys play 20X, you are biased because of the small sample size you do see, you are biased because you love some guys and hate others for reasons unrelated to the game. 


6) Analytics and Advanced Stats  -- If you cannot watch a guy play in person 20X+ then you should rely upon analytics as your primary evaluator.  There are those who say "advanced stats overvalues X and undervalues Y".  This can be true.  VORP overvalues guys who handle the ball a lot.  WS tends to overvalue larger players (the outliers on the top of the chart are bigger guys).  But if you evaluate all of the stats together and look at it over the course of 10-20-30 years, you will generally see that the better players (the guys identified in 1, 2, 4,5 above) are high up on the Advanced Stats.


The belief that your favorite player gets "screwed" by Advanced Stats because they do things measured by Advanced Stats?  That is more an indictment of YOU as a talent evaluator than it is of the stats.  I will concede that there are some opaque stats (stats where you really cannot determine how they are judged) and some stats that really do not properly evaluate guys ("On-Off" stats are useful if you are like Chris Paul and play with players 1-12 on your roster during the course of a game - they are not particularly relevant if you play with great starters who play 40 mpg and then you have a shitty bench that plays 8 mpg).


As an overall evaluative tool, some combination of PER, WS, WS/48, and VORP is almost certainly going to produce a list of the best players in the league, and if it doesn't, that player will generally be sorted out by the fact that he does not achieve in Category #1. 


Strength - see above, also designed to evaluate players across eras


Weaknesses - cannot be the sole determinating factor used.  Some newer stats have no track record of sorting good players from bad.




So - there you go, time for me to get a pen and start ranking.