How Anthony Davis' Career Arc Stacks Up Against the NBA's All-Time Greats
Anthony Davis has made it clear he belongs among the best players in the NBA today.
Last season, the 22-year-old Chicago native finished among the top 10 in scoring, rebounding, field-goal percentage and blocks while leading the league in player efficiency rating (PER) and propelling the New Orleans Pelicans to their first playoff berth in four years.
Whenever a player with Davis' combination of talent, current impact, room for improvement and youth comes along, it's practically routine to wonder where he might wind up in relation to the game's all-time greats. Davis himself seems to have considered it in some depth himself.
"I’m trying to be one of the best that ever played the game," he told Slam's Christopher Cason when asked about the work he's put into his game this summer.
Back in December, Davis assessed his own standing in the basketball world in even greater detail.
"When people talk about the greatest ever, I want to be in that conversation," he told Sports Illustrated's Lee Jenkins. "I’m nowhere close to it. No...where...close. But it’s where I want to go."
If Davis continues his rapacious year-over-year improvement, he'll get there in due course. Despite the prodigious pace at which he's risen through the NBA's ranks, Davis still has a lot of work to do to catch up to his most esteemed predecessors.
The Company He Keeps
Contextualizing Davis' emerging greatness in a way that's easy to digest can be a chore but only in a way that benefits him. When it comes to size, length, defensive prowess and offensive fluidity, Davis is about as unique as they come. The addition of a three-point shot to his arsenal this summer only figures to set him further apart from the crowd.
But as far as the big picture is concerned, the general template for overall greatness is fairly straightforward. Trophies named after Maurice Podoloff and Larry O'Brien figure prominently into that equation. As it happens, only 10 players in NBA history who measured in as tall as (or taller than) the 6'10" Davis have won at least one title and taken home one or more MVPs.
| Bill Russell | 1957-69 | 5 (1958, 1961-63, 1965) | 11 (1957, 1959-66, 1968-69) |
| Wilt Chamberlain | 1959-73 | 4 (1960, 1966-68) | 2 (1967, 1972) |
| Kareem Abdul-Jabbar | 1969-89 | 6 (1971-72, 1974, 1976-77, 1980) | 5 (1971, 1980, 1982, 1985, 1987-88) |
| Moses Malone | 1976-95 | 3 (1979, 1982-83) | 1983 |
| Hakeem Olajuwon | 1984-2002 | 1994 | 2 (1994-95) |
| David Robinson | 1989-2003 | 1995 | 2 (1999, 2003) |
| Shaquille O'Neal | 1992-2011 | 2000 | 4 (2000-02, 2006) |
| Kevin Garnett | 1995- | 2004 | 2008 |
| Tim Duncan | 1997- | 2 (2002-03) | 5 (1999, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2014) |
| Dirk Nowitzki | 1998- | 2007 | 2011 |
First off—look at those names! Those 10 titans account for 31 of the league's champions, 25 of its MVPs and probably about half of all free throws missed (kidding on that last one).
Moreover, the players in this group are probably the ones to whom Davis will be most closely compared when or if his case comes up for Hall of Fame consideration in Springfield, Massachusetts. Despite the recent turn toward guard-oriented play, the NBA's history is still, by and large, built on the backs of great big men. Davis may be a far cry from the hulking giants who carried that torch before him, but he belongs in that evolutionary line nonetheless.
Buckets and the Brow
At present, Davis' pace of production lags well behind those of the game's most massive tentpoles, even though he finished fourth in scoring (24.4 points per game) in 2014-15. This disparity is due, in part, to his own fragility. He's missed nearly 16 games per season since leaving Kentucky with an NCAA title in tow.
Still, in some respects, Davis compares favorably to his forebears through their first three years. On a per-minute basis, Davis ranks right in the middle of the NBA's 10 most decorated bigs.
When it comes to the greatest scorers the game has ever seen, regardless of position, Davis' place isn't quite so favorable.
Among the NBA's top 10 all-time scorers, Davis would check in third in field-goal percentage through Year 3 (52.5 percent). But when it comes to actual points, he can claim superiority only to a guy who skipped college (Kobe Bryant), another who went preps-to-pros but by way of the ABA (Moses Malone) and a third (Dirk Nowitzki) who arrived stateside as a European project.
Still, Davis' "slack" in scoring isn't just a matter of injuries. He arrived in the NBA rather raw, both physically and skill-wise. As a rail-thin 6'10", 212-pound rookie, Davis had neither the strength to hold his own down low nor the arsenal needed to make hay from the mid-range. His length and athleticism portended an immediate defensive impact, but his offensive repertoire was a work in progress.
Those concerns could soon be relegated to the past now that the Brow has packed on another 12 pounds—bringing him up to 253 pounds in total—to go along with a sharpened three-point shot, among a bevy of other new tricks up his sleeve.
Counting Caroms
That added bulk should also serve Davis well on the boards, too. He's led the Pelicans in rebounds per game in each of his first three seasons, but compared to most of the great bigs who preceded him, Davis could use a little extra Windex on the glass.
It comes as no surprise that many of the same names from that group show up on the league's all-time rebounding list.
With the way the focus of NBA basketball has shifted further outward over the years, the likes of Chamberlain, Russell, Abdul-Jabbar and Malone—all among the five most prolific rebounders in league history—can rest easy knowing that their marks are safe from challenges, including whatever Davis may mount in the years to come.
Inclusion for Rejection
Where Davis is already miles ahead of some of his most decorated basketball ancestors, at least on the official stat sheet, is in blocks.
That has everything to do with the league's scorekeeping history. The NBA didn't start tracking blocks as an official stat until the 1973-74 season, after Russell and Chamberlain had already retired and Abdul-Jabbar had four years of pro ball under his belt.
Odds are those three would've put up some gaudy defensive numbers had the Association cared to keep score of swats back then. But it didn't, so you won't find those three in this particular graphic.
The facts that Abdul-Jabbar still stands at third on the all-time blocks list and was the leader when he retired speak to his expertise in that regard. Davis is already arguably the premier shot-blocker in the NBA today, with back-to-back block titles to prove it.
Even those accomplishments put Davis toward the lower end of the most prolific shot-blockers of all time in the early stages of their respective careers:
In Davis' defense, he's operated in a different league, governed by different rules and a different style of play from the one in which Robinson, Olajuwon, Dikembe Mutombo and Mark Eaton made their marks at the rim. The decline of low-post play has left bigs like Davis with fewer opportunities to send hopeful layups and aspirational hook shots into the stands.
Still, if Davis keeps it up, he'll wind up as one of the 10 most productive swatters ever with relative ease.
The Biggest Winners
Planting himself among the top 10 players overall is another story. For any player, Davis included, that typically comes down to a subjective ranking of basketball's biggest legends.
But if there's any proxy for all-time greatness, it's winning. As it happens, there's a statistical metric for that: win shares, which estimates the number of wins an individual player has contributed to his team's tally.
This is where Davis really falls behind the ghosts of the NBA's past:
Such is the price Davis has paid for both his own absences and the slow on-court growth of the squads around him.
The Pelicans improved from 27 wins during his rookie season to 34 in Year 2 to 45 in 2014-15. Steady improvement of that sort is nothing to sneeze at. But Davis' on-court success, however remarkable in some regards, pales in comparison to the early title contention enjoyed by Russell in Boston, Chamberlain in Philadelphia, O'Neal in Orlando, Abdul-Jabbar in Milwaukee and Robinson and Duncan in San Antonio.
Not that the Brow has been completely beaten by his historical competition. As far as his own efficiency is concerned, Davis' early work ranks right up there with the best of the best, both among like-sized players and the overall pool of the game's winningest names:
Last season, Davis led the league with a PER of 30.8. To put that in perspective, Chamberlain, LeBron James and Michael Jordan are the only players who have ever posted higher PERs than that. Of those three, only Chamberlain registered such an astronomical PER by Year 3.
Davis' top-flight overall performance last season is among the many reasons ESPN's Tom Haberstroh tabbed the Brow to be his 2015-16 NBA MVP, ahead of LeBron James:
"Bottom line: Davis is either already better than James or just about eye-to-eye, depending on which measuring stick you use. But that was last season. The 30-year-old James has more miles on his tires than Magic Johnson and Larry Bird ever did. James is exiting his prime while Davis is entering it at age 22.
"
That last nugget may well be the most important one. Davis doesn't turn 23 until March. He's still exceedingly young, with more room for growth than a player of his caliber should have.
But even when he reaches his peak, Davis could have a tough time matching the statistical excellence of his predecessors.
The rules won't let him camp out in the lane like they did during the heydays of Russell and Chamberlain. Nor will the flow of the game toward the perimeter—which Davis will feel on a team that also features Jrue Holiday, Tyreke Evans and Eric Gordon—afford him the same volume of post-up opportunities that pushed Abdul-Jabbar, Malone, Olajuwon, O'Neal and Duncan into the annals of NBA lore.
In some ways, that context might actually bolster Davis' case for all-time greatness when the book has closed on his career. If Davis can dominate a league that's gone out of its way to diminish the advantages that players of his size and skill had once built up, he may well come to define his generation in the NBA and, in turn, carve out rightful spots in all of the sport's most exclusive clubs.
Advanced stats courtesy of Basketball-Reference.com unless otherwise noted.
Josh Martin covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter.
