What Am I Saying When I Say Someone is a Top 36 "All-Time Best" Player?

I found it interesting when I saw that one ranking system asked voters to say, "If you had X at his peak, would you rather have him or the other guy?"  Well, Wilt averaged 50-27 and was so good they changed the size of the lane to specifically harm his dominance.  He then won 3 MVPs AFTER that.  So how does that survey of voters not end with Wilt at #1?  Also, if you are judging just "Hey, guy is super great for one year" then why isn't Bernard King a top 20 all-time player, because I am telling you, a healthy Bernard King just torched everyone he faced.  Derrick Rose should certainly be top 74 there, right?

But I digress.  What am I judging?  What are my criteria?  I set these criteria in 2017, and I think they are fair.  

Once you get to Step E in that analysis, there is some wiggle room to prefer the guys you personally like and snub the guys you personally dislike.  But it is my hope that there is not much room to wiggle.  If one guy is 11X All-NBA and the other guy is 2X, by the time I get to step E, they should be so far apart that I cannot put the 2X guy ahead.  I will concede that my rankings do permit some level of personal preference, largely based upon what I have witnessed by viewing 500 NBA games live and watching untold numbers on TV.  As I have told people in the past, "If you do not like that, you are free to make your own list."

A note about the ABA - I am an ABA supporter.  I am not sure, however, that guys always can get 100% credit for their ABA play.  A lot of guys who were great in the ABA did not put up that level of dominant play in the NBA.  I think that you need to assess the relative strength of the player in both leagues (where possible) and make a subjective guess as to how his ABA stats would transfer,

Finally - a note about old-timey "black and white footage" players:  I am not going to discard these players because they played back in the day.  I do not subscribe to the philosophy that a 6 or 8 team league is easier to dominate than a 30 team league.  I think that, as a general rule, truly great players could have success at any point in time (Wilt, Kareem, Jordan, LeBron all were Finals MVPs on title teams well more than a decade after joining the league).  As a result, my list will credit players more for what they actually accomplished rather than asking how they would do if transported forward 40 years in a time machine. assigned a team, and asked to play that night.

With that understanding and those rules, we now have to get to chopping that group of 77 down to 36.  Then we can rank them.