Top 500 Basketball Players of All-Time

June 15, 2011 By admin 6 Comments (Edit)

Slam Magazine recently released a new top 500 list of NBA players and frankly the only two people pleased with this list must be Michael Jordan and Pervis Ellison. Yes, obviously Michael was first, and for those of you who haven’t heard of Pervis before, he made the list at a respectable position, #500.

Now anyone who makes a list of 500 players of all time in any sport will receive more than a lot of criticism. Take that amount of hatred and multiply it by 100 because that is how bad this top 500 NBA list that Slam magazine came out with is. To start, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is somewhat high being at #7; especially when Shaquille O’Neal is #4. Then you continue down the list and see that Tim Duncan is 8th while Kobe Bryant, Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, and Hakeem Olajuwon are 10-13 respectively. For all those Lebron James fans out there, he was placed at #31 behind Rick Barry, George Mikan, and John Havlicek; just to name a few.

I could go on for days about how wrong almost every player on this list is, but instead I will try to explain why and how Slam made these mistakes. The players on this list are only ranked by their statistics. Every basketball fan understands that a lot more goes into a star than just their numbers. Furthermore, the players that were going at it back in the day got screwed. Any ABA stats that some of the old greats had, such as Artis Gilmore, were not counted thus dropping them between 50-150 places on the list. Also, Steve Kerr, a 5-time NBA champion had his name excluded as well because he most likely didn’t have a stat or two that Pervis did. I mean who cares about championships anyway, right?

 

 

The next problem is the list only includes what the individuals have done as PLAYERS, and the NBA is composed of so much more. For example, Phil Jackson (the all-time winningest man in NBA history), Pat Riley and John Wooden were all left off the list. What about historical personnel to the NBA? Don’t they mean anything? What about the first African-American players to participate in the league…To me they mean more to the game today then 450 players on that list. Charles Cooper and Earl Lloyd were the Jackie Robinson of the NBA (to a lesser extent that is).

To be considered for the list in the first place, you must have played on an NBA roster for at least 5 seasons. That’s too bad because I thought Kevin Durant and Derrick Rose were pretty solid players. I must be confused because I was always under the impression that the NBA Scoring Title and the MVP awards were somewhat significant.

I have tried not to look too much into the rankings and just get the overall feel of who is in and who is out, but I cannot help myself anymore…I was unaware that there are 85 NBA players that are better than Dwight Howard and even more that are better than Carmelo Anthony and Chris Paul. Oh yeah and I can easily name 143 players that have more impact on games than Amar’e Stoudemire. I mean come on Slam, Ron Artest is better than Manu Ginobili and Amar’e? Yao Ming, “Mr. Injured,” gets to play a season or two and since he is a giant he gets #154.

All in all, most of the top 500 players of all-time are in this list, just most of them are in very wrong places. Check out the list yourself and let me know what you think!!!