The Basketball 100 podcast's ranking of the NBA's 100 greatest players

New York Times

a day ago

You followed along for three-and-a-half months as we revealed our top 75 players in NBA history.
Led by veteran columnists David Aldridge and John Hollinger, and with a foreword from Hall of Famer Charles Barkley, we expanded that into a book where we wrote about those 75, and 25 more, to explore the careers of the NBA's greatest 100 players. We also took a different look at the greatest players as well with our G.O.A.T. points metric.
Now, you can listen to the six-part podcast featuring The Athletic's NBA staff engage in lively discussions about the top 100 players in NBA history.
Hosted by Jared Weiss and featuring Tony Jones and Mike Vorkunov, this episode focuses on Nos. 100-80 in our book. The trio talks about which players have brought the most joy, recounts the players that people may not know well, and discusses which players are too high and too low.
The story of the greatest players in NBA history. In 100 riveting profiles, top basketball writers justify their selections and uncover the history of the NBA in the process.
The story of the greatest players in NBA history.
From a young age, Jayson Tatum planned not just to reach the NBA, but also to become an All-Star. He mapped out everything he would need, both on and off the court, to reach that level. He trusted his chances until he actually reached the NBA. Then he realized one variable he had overlooked throughout all of his preparation for the rigors of professional basketball.
'Everybody's so much better than you think,' Tatum said.
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The boy who changed basketball preferred the solitude of an empty gym: the syncopated rhythm of squeaking shoes, the swish of the net, the echo of dribbles against a hardwood floor, plenty of open court to try things — to build the perfect jumper, to invent a novel spin move, to run and dribble and sweat and, in his words, fool around and throw up a hook shot from 35 feet.
For Pete Maravich, an empty gymnasium meant freedom. If you gave him a basketball, he could see the future.
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At 8 years old, Luka Dončić was already transcendent.
His father, Saša, is a local basketball legend, twice winning the Slovenian League championship, once for Ljubljana's most prestigious club, Olimpija. In 2007, that's where Saša brought Luka for his first professional practice with the club's under-9 team.
It didn't last even a half hour. That under-9 team's coach was Grega Brezovec, who laughed when he retold the story to The Athletic in 2019. 'If I'm honest, I was his coach for only 16 minutes,' he said.
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Allen Iverson, in the most private of areas in the Spectrum Center, couldn't help but get sentimental. A Charlotte resident, he went to check out a Hornets game against his former 76ers and ended up chilling with his GOAT.
Iverson and Michael Jordan. Having a drink or two. Reminiscing about their glory days.
Iverson is an icon. Still, it means something for him to be a peer of Jordan. So he was all in his feelings.
'Man, I love you, man,' he told Jordan.
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Walt Frazier's reverence for Willis Reed ran so deep that he copied his handwriting.
Penmanship, Frazier believes, reveals much about a person: their intelligence, their mood, even their ego. When Reed wrote, Frazier mostly saw consistency — the same trait he remembers defining the player affectionately nicknamed 'The Captain.'
'If you saw a thousand signatures by Willis, they're all the same: neat,' he said.
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One day in the spring of 2018, a Philadelphia 76ers assistant named Billy Lange looked at his phone and saw a text message from Joel Embiid: 'I want to pray.'
It was a Sunday in April. The NBA playoffs were a week old. It was not the usual afternoon greeting from an NBA star, but then again, there was nothing usual about Joel Embiid.
At that point, he was just 24 years old, a 7-foot behemoth who had feet like a ballet dancer and the droll wit of a stand-up comic. He had grown up an ocean away in Cameroon, the well-to-do son of a military colonel, and he had not played the sport of basketball until he was a teenager. When he considered his life story, he sometimes believed it to be something out of a movie, a surreal Hollywood dream.
But here he was, in the middle of the NBA playoffs, wearing a clunky mask to protect a broken orbital bone near his left eye. Lange sensed he was nervous. Maybe even scared. The day before, the No. 3–seeded Sixers had defeated the Heat in Miami to take a 3–1 series lead. But Embiid had scored just 14 points. Something seemed off.
Lange tapped out a reply. Did he want to pray together?
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Rick Weitzman, stuck in the worst type of traffic, heard a knock on his windshield. John Havlicek wanted to grab his attention. Even Boston, usually prepared for a winter storm, was caught off guard by substantial snow in the middle of November. Cars were in gridlock. The two Celtics players, stuck on the Tobin Bridge, needed to make it to Boston Garden in time for a game. The way the roads were configured in 1967, Weitzman said, the drive would have taken about five minutes under normal traffic conditions.
'The clock (to game time) was moving,' Weitzman said. 'And I wasn't.'
Havlicek had an idea. He couldn't risk missing the start of a contest with the San Francisco Warriors. His wife, Beth, was in their car a handful of paces behind Weitzman, but Havlicek knew he couldn't afford to stay with her. He would find his way to the arena, which was about two miles away.
'I can't wait,' Havlicek told Weitzman. 'I'm going to run in.'
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Most of history's great players have come to us with significant early hype and quick, confirmatory coronation events. A few greats have taken a more circuitous path.
Perhaps none has snuck up on us quite the way Nikola Jokić did. Forget about his origins as a pudgy second-round pick whose selection was made during a Taco Bell commercial. Even after he'd won two MVPs, much of the world wasn't all that convinced he was a pantheon-level player. It wasn't until after he'd led the Nuggets to a romp to the 2023 NBA title that his overdue recognition as an all-time great began.
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Khris Middleton heard Giannis Antetokounmpo's screams.
Antetokounmpo, the two-time NBA regular-season MVP — the Milwaukee Bucks' best player and greatest hope to win their first NBA title in half a century — was writhing in pain with 7 minutes, 14 seconds remaining in the third quarter of Game 4 of the 2021 Eastern Conference finals in Atlanta.
'I heard him yell,' Middleton said after the Game 4 loss to the Hawks. 'I was looking up, so I couldn't really see exactly what happened.'
What happened could have changed the course of NBA history. But, because of who Antetokounmpo is, he wouldn't let it.
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It was one of those perfect summer evenings during a family trip from Minnesota to the northeast in 1995, 65 degrees and sunny as 6-year-old me walked into Fenway Park for the first time. The Red Sox were hosting the Toronto Blue Jays and we settled into our seats near the top of a section above the third-base dugout, ready for a momentous occasion for a sports-crazy kid who begged his parents to sprinkle some games into the history and sightseeing.
As I sat down and marveled at the Green Monster in front of me, I couldn't help but pull out a Sony Walkman, put the headphones over my ears, and start listening as intently as I was watching. It wasn't the radio broadcast of the game but coverage of the 1995 NBA Draft.
My hometown Minnesota Timberwolves had the fifth pick, and there were so many intriguing possibilities in a class filled with household names. Jerry Stackhouse and Rasheed Wallace from North Carolina. Damon Stoudamire from Arizona. Michigan State's Shawn Respert and UCLA's Ed O'Bannon. All were players I watched on television at storied college programs who became well-known stars with tantalizing potential.
There was another name out there I had never seen take one dribble, but he grabbed my attention as much as any other. In the week leading up to the draft, I pulled Sports Illustrated out of the mailbox to see a skinny high school kid on the cover with the tagline 'Ready or Not … '
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You can't blame Michael Cooper for making one of the first recorded business decisions.
On January 5, 1983, Cooper — who would go on to become an eight-time NBA All-Defensive Team selection and the 1986-87 NBA Defensive Player of the Year — and his Los Angeles Lakers were in Philadelphia to meet the 76ers, whom they'd vanquished in the previous season's NBA Finals. Big game, big implications. The game, as befitting two of the league's titans, went to overtime.
In the extra session, James Worthy attempted a pass to Jamaal Wilkes, the Lakers' silky small forward. But Philly's Maurice Cheeks deflected the pass, and the ball bounced away from Wilkes and to Cooper near midcourt.
Except Julius Erving got to the ball first, cutting in front of Cooper. Two dribbles later, Erving was just inside the free-throw line extended. Cooper, though, was timing his steps to be able to contest a drive-by Erving. Michael Cooper, being Michael Cooper — the man Larry Bird would later say was the best defender he'd ever faced—could still get to this shot. Maybe block it. At the least, he could challenge it.
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It was a contradiction of the image he so meticulously cultivated. Yet it was an authentic glimpse of the driving force inside him. Psycho Steph Curry. The alter ego that has elevated him to unimaginable heights, landing him a seat at the table of basketball's all-time best. And on the hallowed parquet of Boston, under the Celtics' 17 banners, it emerged in Game 6 of the 2022 NBA Finals to punctuate his legend.
With the Warriors up 19, Draymond Green sped up the court on a fast break. Curry was trailing the play before veering left into Green's periphery. Green bounced a pass to his left, angling it so Curry could catch it in stride. But Curry didn't scoop up the pass and keep going toward the rim. Nor did he pass the ball to an open teammate while the Celtics' defense was scattered. Curry was in psycho mode. So he pulled up right where he caught it.
The official NBA box score says it was 29 feet. Inside TD Garden, it felt like 50. It was so sudden. So far. So unnecessary. Curry's momentum caused him to lean forward on the pull-up 3, giving it a shotput feel. It sliced through the anxious gasp of Celtics fans before thumping the back of the rim as it went through, putting the Warriors up 22. The net barely moved.
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He's lovable. The 7-foot-1 teddy bear with the animated general selling auto insurance. He's on the cover of Frosted Flakes and is a pizza pitchman with an executive role at Papa John's. You might be able to relate to him if you treat your back pain with Icy Hot. He has gold (Gold Bond and an Olympic medal), and don't forget about the weekly back-and-forths with Charles Barkley on TNT's Inside the NBA.
Shaquille O'Neal may be retired from the NBA, but he is everywhere.
For a certain generation, it's hard to imagine O'Neal as one of the greatest basketball players ever. But the playful big man was a punishing athlete who didn't just dunk. 'The Diesel' dunked through opponents, leaving bodies and broken backboards in his wake. And not just backboards, as Darryl Dawkins did, but whole stanchions. He did it while having fun and while intimidating opposing big men.
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Four thousand, one hundred twenty-four.
Of all the numbers associated with Wilt Chamberlain's eventful, incredible 63 years, that number — 4,124 — is among the most significant.
That's the number of people who were, allegedly, at what was then the Hershey Sports Arena in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on March 2, 1962, to witness the NBA game that night between Chamberlain's Philadelphia Warriors and the New York Knicks. It's more likely there were far fewer people there, given the, let's say, creative ways in which attendance for games in the still-fledgling-at-the-time NBA was often tabulated.
The game was not televised. Only a grainy recording of the fourth quarter of the radio broadcast, by WCAU's Bill Campbell, was preserved. None of the Knicks beat writers made the trip; only a couple came from Philly, about 95 miles southeast of town, so meaningless an assignment it was believed to be. But Hershey was a regular stop on the NBA circuit in those days, as teams barnstormed nearby towns to drum up regional support.
Two hours later, Chamberlain had set the mark that best defined his lifetime of association with prodigiousness. He became the first and only player in NBA history to score 100 points in a contest.
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The morning after one of the most miserable nights of his career, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was the first to arrive at the film session. He sat in the front row, center chair, right in front of the television. It was an odd seat selection, and not just because this 7-foot-2 giant was now blocking the view. It was an area usually left vacant during these tape studies, but Abdul-Jabbar was about to be a witness to his execution.
Los Angeles Lakers coach Pat Riley began scribbling points of emphasis on the board.
Rebound. Stop Bird. Don't double too early.
Then Riley locked eyes with Kareem.
'I'll never forget this. He didn't say it to me, but I know what he was thinking: Don't hold back on me today,' Riley said.
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(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic)
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