Rating Players: The Best Basketball Player Ever

You can’t think of the ‘80s Lakers without thinking about Magic flipping a pass to the open man on a break.

Say the ‘80s Celtics and there is an image of Larry Bird making a clever pass into a teammate open in the lane. 

Two of the most successful teams of all time revolved around two guys that were considered the best at making their teammates better. If you are looking at stats, neither Magic nor Bird looks all that great, but their impact on the game was arguably far greater than their stats.

There is a whole class of players who dominate games but rarely show up well in stats.  Does that make them of less quality than the great scorers? Hardly. 

While guys like MJ and Wilt were dominating scorers, players like Magic got all of their teammates involved and broke down team defenses.

Who was the best?

This is usually where the author pulls this or that argument out to support their favorite player. The reality, as I’ve demonstrated, is that there are valid arguments for several players. Basketball is a team sport and sometimes great team play is not a measurable quality.

I received a comment the other day on a different article saying that the commenter had stopped watching NBA games for two years after the player he thought was the best ever retired. When I read that I actually felt bad for the guy, he had grown so fond of one player that the game itself was secondary.

I think that’s the danger of this whole notion of the best ever. If you truly think you’ve seen the best ever then why watch any other games? Personally I’d prefer to think the best ever has yet to play and that until every game has been played we can’t possibly know who that best player will be.

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