NBA All-Time Objective Top Ten

Introduction: Or, Who Are the Top Ten?

The Consensus Top Ten (Really 11) in NBA History generally looks something like this:

1. Jordan
2. LeBron
3. Kareem
4. Magic
5. Bird
6. Russell
7. Wilt
8. Duncan
9. Kobe
10. Hakeem
11. Shaq

Obviously this is subjective -- you see some jostling toward the bottom, as someone always gets left off (typically one of Kobe, Shaq, and Hakeem, based on bias; occasionally it'll be Russell). Some people have different orders toward the top (Bill Simmons as of 2010 had Russell at #2, as well as West and Robertson above Shaq and Hakeem). But this is basically the list you tend to see.

This list is terrible, not necessarily because the order is bad (although it is...), but because it has no clear organizing philosophy. Jordan is on top, allegedly for his scoring and his Finals win percentage. But LeBron is there for, what, Finals appearances? Kareem's there for scoring and rings, Magic and Bird for playing in a bunch of legendary Finals together and "dominating the '80s," plus Bird's consecutive MVPs get brought up. Why isn't Bird ahead of Magic? Rings. But then why isn't Kareem ahead of LeBron? Well, Kareem had more help. But then why isn't Hakeem ahead of Shaq? Well, Shaq was more dominant. But then why isn't Wilt ahead of Bird? Well, he didn't win as many rings. But then why isn't Russell ahead of Jordan? Well, because he wasn't good at offense. And around and around we go.

All these arguments look more than anything like post-hoc rationalizations of an arbitrary list based on "common knowledge." Jordan is #1 because he's the GOAT, right? If you press me I can talk about 30.1 and 6-0, but let's be real, it's because he's the GOAT. Magic's ahead of Bird because he won more, but they're always back-to-back because, well, they played against each other! And how could you not have them together! And Kobe's low because he's mean, and he played with Shaq (unlike the other players on this list, who never had talent around them and CERTAINLY never played with anyone else on this list).

Now I, being a nice and friendly girl, would never dream of imposing a rigorous philosophy that might challenge this dogma, but I do want to give this list a spine! So in this article, I will attempt to create a single formula that will provide this exact same list but with a thin veneer of objectivity.

N.B. I'm sure there's a much more efficient mathematical method to generate a formula here but it's probably less fun.

The Parameters:

So what extremely objective metrics will I use? Nothing crazy; no Win Shares Per 48 or Field Goal Percentage or anything radical like that. No, the stats we're using for this are simple, wholesome, everyday stats: rings, career points per game, finals appearances, seasons played, rings per season, finals appearances versus another player on this list, three point percentage, finals win percentage, MVPs, and assist titles.

The Stat:

The Top Ten Players of All Time are determined by the following metric:

4 * rings + 4.5 * career PPG + 3 * Finals appearances + 25 * rings per season + 15 * Finals appearances vs another player on this list + 5 * 3 point percentage + 70 * Finals win percentage + 2 * seasons played + 60 * MVPs + 8 * assist titles

Perfectly sensible.

What? Why?

So here's how this goes.

- The rings are much less valued than other factors because there really isn't that strong a correlation between rings and the order of this list. In order from 1st to 11th, the number of rings goes 6, 4, 6, 5, 3, 11, 2, 5, 5, 2, 4. That's a correlation coefficient of -0.27 (which, since lower numbers is better, is basically a small positive correlation).

- Career PPG is largely here to boost Jordan and Wilt and keep Russell from running away with this (despite rings being a relatively undervalued metric, many of the metrics are Finals- or ring-based, and Russell has a huge lead over everyone there). It also keeps Duncan a little lower than he would otherwise be.

- Finals appearances actually correlate a little better with this list: -0.48, or a fairly strong correlation (again, negative numbers are good here). So this is just a good stat for generating our list in general.

- Rings per season I don't remember why I picked. This was iterative and I'm not trying to mess with the order now.

- Finals appearances vs. other players on this list is pretty arbitrary and funny but is also the easiest way to get Magic and Bird into the top half of the list (Magic in particular benefits from it a lot). There are other ways to do it without this stat, but this was the first way I used.

- Three point percentage is because Bird doesn't really have a strong argument for top 5 without it lol.

- Finals win % was the initial Jordan cheat code, to keep him in first while we figured out everyone else. As it turns out it ends up benefiting Duncan more than anyone (relative to ranking; obviously as a percentage it's Jordan and everyone else at 100%).

- Seasons played I think was for Kareem.

- The last two were annoying. Wilt was stuck at the end of the list and I had to bring in MVPs to get him above Duncan, Kobe, Hakeem, and possibly even Shaq. After a lot of nudging we got him in place, but then to bring Russell down from ahead of Jordan we needed to mess with 3 point percentage. But that ended up moving Bird over Magic, so to fine-tune I had to bring in assist titles (which also benefits LeBron and WILT!!) to push Magic into 4th.

So is this a good metric?

No lmfao. Just for fun, let's throw a bunch of other players into this metric and witness the horror that emerges. I'm going to add a bunch of other great players from history who aren't typically considered top 10 (11) of all time and see where they end up. I'll also add some modern players.

Our more inclusive list!

1. Jordan
2. LeBron
3. Kareem
4. Dr. J (including ABA)
5. Magic
6. Bird
7. Steph Curry
8. Russell
9. Kevin Durant
10. Wilt
11. Steve Nash
12. Duncan
13. Kobe
14. Dirk Nowitzki
15. Karl Malone
16. Moses Malone
17. Scottie Pippen
18. Kevin Garnett
19. John Stockton
20. Robert Horry
21. Dr. J (just NBA numbers and accolades)
22. Hakeem
23. Giannis Antetokounmpo
24. Bob Pettit
25. Bob Cousy
26. Shaq

There are definitely other guys in there ahead of Shaq (it's a fair bet that a lot of '60s Celtics are), but I got bored at 30 players (the other four, coming in after Shaq, are John Havlicek, Dennis Rodman, Jerry West, and George Mikan, in that order). It's a lot of data lol.

This is not actually evidence that the metric is bad -- what it's evidence of is that this approach to ranking players is very inconsistent and than a metric approximating it will give unpredictable results. And of course it does! The original list is not based on this metric lol. I don't actually think this metric does THAT BAD a job at measuring the thing it's measuring. Like I'm shocked at how good that list is lol. You get weird stuff like Horry (because we don't have a built-in factor for like "nth best player on a championship team" other than PPG and MVPs), but I'm not sure that guys like Pippen and Garnett SHOULDN'T be ahead of guys like Pettit and Dr. J. And I'm not sure there's a good argument for having Steph Curry all that much lower than, like, Russell or Wilt or Hakeem.

But that said, this metric IS bad. It's built from pieces that very roughly approximate how good a player is, but they're thrown together in really weird proportions to get the order we needed. For an example, let's look at what pieces actually make up a player's score.

Score Analysis: Magic Johnson

Magic's score in this metric is 624.75... That's not normalized or anything. I've described all the pieces that go into it, but here's how much each piece contributed to the final score:

Rings: 3.2% (i.e. 5 rings * 4 = 20 points / 625.75 points)
PPG: 14.0%
Finals appearances: 4.3%
Seasons played: 4.2%
Rings per season: 1.5%
Finals appearances vs another top 11 player: 9.6%
3 point percentage: 24.2%
Finals win %: 6.2%
MVPS: 28.8%
Assist titles: 3.8%

That's actually a fairly even breakdown -- 3 point percentage is high because he's a guard, and MVPs because he has so many (3 is a lot), but even the small percentages affect the results a lot -- Magic is only 1.6 points (0.25%) ahead of Bird, and 63 points (about 10%) behind Kareem. This is why fine-tuning the list took so long lol.

So?

So it's not a great metric but it produces the list we want. And if you're going to cling to a stupid list based on nothing, you might as well invent a consistent, objective basis for it, and this isn't any worse than your intuition lol. At the very least it's consistent.

So can LeBron pass Jordan?

Are you kidding?

No, can LeBron pass Jordan?

Well, a side effect of the tweaks I had to make is that Jordan is out in front by a mile (it's largely his MVPs, 3P%, and PPG, in that order), so... no! Your childhood hero is safe.

But what would it take for LeBron to pass Jordan?

Jesus, are you serious? Okay, fine. Let's assume LeBron's PPG and 3P% stays even. What would he need? Well, some MVPs would do it -- even one MVP brings him close enough to Jordan that it and an assist title puts him over the top. But that might be unlikely, given how old he is and how little he tries in the regular season. So what about rings?

Uh, he would need a lot of rings. Like if he made and won the Finals every year (and did nothing else), he would pass Jordan at TEN rings.

What the fuck?

It's MVPs, bro. I needed to crank them way up to get Jordan to #1 (and then crank up 3P% to get Kareem down to third lol).

So LeBron for MVP?

??? I guess lol. If LeBron wins one more MVP he is officially the greatest player of all time. But if he wins nine rings and DOESN'T win another MVP then he's #2 forever. Or until Steph passes him.

Six People

Remember when I posted this article? In it I explained how Jerry West and Red Auerbach are more responsible than anyone else for their teams winning championships. Well, in this article I'm going a step further: I'm going to show why a majority of championships are attributable to one or more of the same six people. Six people who have decided, or had a hand in deciding, more than half of all championships in NBA history.

Let's go.

Jerry West.

West was a player on the Lakers from 1961 to 1974. In that span he made nine finals and won one. He coached the Lakers to okay success, then worked in the front office from '79 through to '02, in which span the Lakers made 12 finals and won 8. The core he had helped put together made and lost another Finals in '04, and Kobe, a player he was largely responsible for bringing to the Lakers, was a key part of teams that made three straight finals from '08 to '10, winning two. I'm giving West enough credit for those Finals to count them.

From LA, West went to Memphis, making the team better but not making the Finals, and finally to Golden State, in 2011. He left the team in 2017, but the roster he'd assembled made five finals, winning three.

Running Total: 30 Finals, 14 Championships

Red Auerbach.

Auerbach was a coach and GM, then just a GM, and finally a higher-level exec for the Celtics from 1950 (really '51) to around 1990, at which point he lost interest in being heavily involved in the Celtics' affairs. Consequently I'm willing to give him credit for everything through that time, but not the Big 3 era in '08-'10 (i.e. I'm not giving him partial credit for the drafting of Paul Pierce in 1998, which was the only real Big 3-related acquisition before Auerbach's death in 2006).

Final Total: 19 Finals, 16 Championships

Phil Jackson.

Jackson played as a minor player on the champion Knicks of '70 and '73, although I'm not giving him credit because in '70 he was injured all year (but still received a ring) and in '73 he was a minor player and not a contributor on the level that we're talking about for this article. (I'm not interested in dividing up championships into "shares," but it's fair to say that most of these guys constitute a sine qua non, i.e. if they weren't or hadn't been involved their teams likely wouldn't have won. I don't think Jackson in '73 meets that criterion. I do think West in '72 does, which is why I'm counting that ring for him.)

Anyway, after the Knicks Jackson coached for a number of teams, notably the Bulls (from 1990-1998) and the Lakers (from 2000-2011, minus '05), making 13 Finals and winning 11 Championships in the process. It's worth noting, though, that 7 of those Finals and 5 of the Championships overlap with West (and in fact Jackson in a sense "firms up" the latter three Kobe/Gasol Finals and makes them unequivocally count for this list), so I'll note Phil's total and then those championships of Phil that I haven't otherwise attributed.

Final Total: 13 Finals, 6 unique; 11 Championships, 6 unique

Pat Riley.

Riley played for the Lakers in the '70s (although I'm not counting their Finals appearances in '72 or '73 for Riley for the same logic as Jackson's, and because they're already covered by West). Then he coached for the team as an assistant and then head coach from '80 to '90. Following that, he went to the Knicks from '92 to '95, then the Heat from '96 to '08 minus '04 and '05. In that time, and through to the present, he has served as an executive with the Heat as well.

Consequently, Riley gets credit for the '80s Lakers successes (which we're already attributing to West, but which constitute 8 Finals and five rings (n.b. Riley was gone by the Lakers' '91 Finals, and as a coach didn't have enough to do with that team to get credit, not that it matters)), as well as those of the Knicks (a Finals appearance in '94) and Heat (6 appearances and three titles since '06, including most recently an appearance and loss in '20).

Running Total: 15 Finals, 7 unique; 8 Championships, 3 unique

John Kundla.

Time to go way back in time. Kundla was the coach of the Lakers from 1948 to 1959, leading them to six Finals and five Championships (n.b. the Lakers also technically won the 1948 NBL championship under Kundla, but we're not counting it because it was technically a different league, and I'm certainly not bringing in the ABA either).

Final Total: 6 Finals, 5 Championships

Gregg Popovich.

Finally. Popovich coached (and managed) the Spurs to their only six Finals appearances, winning five.

Running Total: 6 Finals, 5 Championships

Tally: These six people, between them, accumulated 74 Finals appearances* and 49 Championships.

While all 49 of those championships are unique (in other words, these six guys have unequivocally accounted for 49 of the 74 total championships in NBA history), those 74 appearances do run into each other (i.e. we're not counting overlaps with the same team, but with OPPOSING teams we are.) For instance, West's Finals appearances as a player were almost all playing against Auerbach's Celtics, and in the '80s, Auerbach (as Celtics GM), West (as Lakers GM), and Riley (as Lakers coach) butted heads in several Finals. So how much overlap is there (i.e. how many Finals included one or more of these guys on either side)? And how many Finals didn't feature at least one of these guys?

Overlap:

1959 - Kundla vs Auerbach
1962, '63, '65, '66, '68, '69 - West vs Auerbach
1984, '85, '87 - West and Riley vs Auerbach
1991 - West vs Jackson
2013, '14 - Popovich vs Riley

So in total, 13/74 Finals featured one or more of these six people on each team.

(Fun fact, and it doesn't count, but in '70 and '73 West's Lakers met player!Jackson's Knicks in the Finals.)

Finals Without the Six:

You can just do the math and determine 74-13 = 61, so the answer's 13. But if you're wondering:

1947 - Stags vs Warriors
1948 - Bullets vs Warriors
1951 - Royals vs Knicks
1955 - Pistons vs Nationals
1956 - Pistons vs Warriors
1967 - Warriors vs 76ers
1971 - Bucks vs Bullets
1975 - Warriors vs Bullets
1977 - Blazers vs 76ers
1978 - Sonics vs Bullets
1979 - Sonics vs Bullets
1990 - Blazers vs Pistons
1995 - Rockets vs Magic

A few quick notes. First of all, I love how many legendary teams are on here -- the '67 76ers (that's the one Wilt team that got past the Celtics) and the '71 Bucks (that's the Kareem/Oscar Robertson team) stand out, and the '90 Pistons and '95 Rockets get talked about a little. Second, it's astounding that every single Finals since 1995 has one or more of our six. That's by far the longest streak in NBA history, at 25 years (second-longest was 10 years from '57-'66), and two of our six were retired or dead. It was all Jackson, Popovich, West, and Riley. I wonder what's causing this, other than a confluence of those four guys being active at the same time. Finally, it's interesting that the '50s and '70s are the decades that we mostly miss, but it makes sense -- Kundla was the only one of our six around for most of the '50s (Auerbach shows up for the first time in the '57 Finals). As for the '70s, that's before Riley, Jackson, or Popovich really showed up as coaches, and West was in his awkward transition between player and exec, so you're really only getting West's player Finals and Auerbach's two titles.

Who Else?

So it's obviously tempting to try to fill the gaps here. And we CAN -- Eddie Gottlieb, Les Harrison, Charles Eckman, someone in the 6ers organization, someone in the Bullets' organization (I can't find a name and I'm not super eager to look), Chuck Daly, and Rudy Tomjanovich could potentially get us to 74/74 appearances with 13 total people (n.b. I'm assuming there are some important people in common through a few of these teams, but I don't know who ran the front office of e.g. the Bullets in the '70s). But none of those guys are really qualified for this list. The point of what we're doing here is to isolate the people most responsible for championships. Unless there really is one guy in common through those four Bullets teams (I don't think there is -- they had three coaches through those four finals -- and even if there was, they'd be 1-3 in Finals and a far stretch from our LEAST successful member, the 5-1 John Kundla), these are basically just random years when our guys just weren't quite there.

We can obviously get to 74/74 rings too with quite a lot more work, but again, there's no one I can find who was responsible for more than two (MAYBE three) rings in that span, and that's just not a level of success that's terribly interesting to me. It's possible there's some exec I'm missing who went from team to team and ended up playing a role in five or more rings outside of the Big Six's sphere, but I seriously doubt it. The teams that won the other 25 championships are a really random assortment. The Warriors have 11 total appearances, but never more than two in a decade (until West showed up). The Sixers likewise show up a couple times but not really in a short span. And then you have a bunch of one- or two-off teams that captured lightning in a bottle: a brief flush of talent along with a down year for our Six. Think the '70s Knicks or the mid-'90s Rockets (the LAST Finals that didn't feature one or more of our Six).

Finally, there are obviously people we can pick up who overlap hugely with one or more of these six guys. For instance, Tex Winter coached under Jackson for all but one of Jackson's championship teams, meaning he's more accomplished than several people on this list as an assistant coach. And Winter in particular played a huge role in organizing the offenses on those teams. But ultimately we're looking for the people who stand out, and to do so I can't include every overlap. This is also the reason you don't see any players -- Bill Russell won 11 championships, yes, but we're giving the credit to Auerbach for the purposes of this exercise, because we can see that Auerbach extended his winning tradition far beyond Russell's tenure. And there's no player who had close to this level of impact without sharing it with one or more coaches.

Coda.

One quick note.

With these six guys, we got to 74 appearances and 49/74 championships. But with only the first four (West, Auerbach, Jackson, and Riley), we could have gotten to 62 appearances and 39/74 championships, which is obviously still more than half. Moreover, the gap between our fourth-most-successful person (Pat Riley, with 15 Finals and 8 Championships) and the last two (6 Finals and 5 Championships apiece) is relatively large. This is particularly interesting because Popovich and Kundla are also the most limited on this list with respect to role (they were both coaches, although Popovich also manages and Kundla had at least some role in management) and team (they both worked for the same team for their whole (relevant) careers and in the same role). In other words, we really have four people of massive scope and two of very large scope. Popovich and Kundla are clearly the LEAST impressive of these six, but my inclination was to include them, if only because they're still much more impressive than anyone else.

Similarly, Popovich and Kundla have by far the weakest cases to even be on this list, because you can make the argument that they were only successful because of their players (Duncan and to a lesser extent Parker, Ginobili, and Robinson for Popovich, and Mikan et al. for Kundla). All the other guys here are very clearly more successful than any of their players (the closest thing to dubious credit would be Tex Winters, again, as assistant coach for Jackson, and I'm simply going with Jackson on that one). Again, I'm choosing to include them. An argument in favor of each: Popovich is obviously largely responsible for the Spurs' consistent success as a franchise, which spans from early in Duncan's career through well into his decline. And Kundla did in fact make a Finals without Mikan (in '59), he just lost.

Finally, Kundla chose to stay in Minnesota when the Lakers moved to LA. It's very possible that if he had gone with the team, he would have shared in a lot of West's successes, and maybe even gotten the team over the top (who knows?). These hypotheticals aren't really the focus of this article, but they're worth noting.

Which All-NBA First Team is Best?

 I'm not going to link them all; you can find them here. But I'll go through and pull out what I consider to be the best team from each era and compare them.

1962:
Oscar Robertson
Jerry West
Elgin Baylor
Bob Pettit
Wilt Chamberlain

This is as good as it gets in the 60s. We're taking this team over the '67 team (which had Barry over Pettit) by a nose. Barry is probably a better player than Pettit, but Pettit's a true 4 who fits better, possibly, alongside our scoring backcourt. I don't really know though. I've obviously never watched him play.

1988:
Magic Johnson
Michael Jordan
Larry Bird
Charles Barkley
Hakeem Olajuwon

That's right, we just skipped 25 years into the future. That's because most of the teams in the middle had clear weak points (to name a few guys I've literally never heard of: Gus Williams, Marques Johnson, Truck Robinson, David Thompson, Dave Bing). This team does not. It basically outclasses every team that came before it, including, unfortunately, our '62 heroes. It's genuinely pretty hard for me to imagine any team beating this one, either. The offense is fantastic, the defense isn't amazing but Hakeem, Jordan, and Bird should do okay, and any team with Magic, Jordan, Bird, and Hakeem is going to outclass just about anyone else on pure talent. Slight edge over the '87 team, which had McHale over Barkley.

2006:
Steve Nash
Kobe BEAN Bryant
LeBron James
Dirk Nowitzki
Shaquille O'Neal

I think this is as good a team as we're getting for Kobe. Past here the lack of a center is gonna bite us. This team is obviously insane -- the shooting is there, the defense is sort of there. Passing. Offensively, this team's probably as good as anyone.

2008:
Chris Paul
Kobe Bryant
LeBron James
Kevin Garnett
Dwight Howard

If you like defense, this is about the best team in history. I like defense, and it is possible this team beats all others for that reason alone.

All other teams are trash.

Hybrids

The best starting five but each position we get to use a hybrid of two players. We're being fairly but not totally strict about positions and we're not reusing players. The players bring their pluses but not their minuses -- two players with bad passing will take whosever is better, and two players with complementary skills in the same category (e.g. Steph's distance shooting plus Kobe's midrange) will bring the best of both.

PG: Steph Curry / Chris Paul

If we were to define our Ideal Point Guard Skillset, it would probably look something like Shooting -- Passing -- Defense. For Shooting there are a few options: Steph is first by far, and Nash is like a much lower-volume Steph (and consequently has nowhere near the impact through his shooting that Steph does). For Passing we'd ideally like to see Magic or Nash, but Paul isn't that far behind. And for Defense, my traditional choice is Payton but Paul has been so good while defending against by far the best, quickest, and most athletic group of point guards we've ever seen that I'm actually not convinced he's that much worse. So we're compromising here a little bit.

How could we possibly look to improve? Nash/Payton is always an option, but we lose the impact of Steph's shooting. Initially I was going to go Steph/Payton, but I think the difference between Paul's passing and Steph/Payton's is a little bigger than the difference between Payton's defense and Paul's.

SG: Kobe Bryant / Ray Allen

This one is a little strange. We still like the Shooting -- Passing -- Defense triad, but with less emphasis on Passing and more on Shooting (and particularly we'd like to see versatility in scoring -- finishing at the rim and midrange scoring ability are desirable here). But the shooting guard position is a little weird. We have Kobe and Jordan at the top, then like Wade, Harden, Jerry West... It's a mess. And there are no outstanding defenders up there. We could talk about like Tony Allen, but then you're settling for Kobe or like James Harden (eww) on offense, and I think we can do a little better.

Kobe's defense is good enough for me here, and his midrange scoring and finishing is in my opinion a little better developed and more sophisticated than Jordan's. As far as distance shooting, my initial inclination was Klay Thompson, but prime Allen was about as productive on similar efficiency with a lot more of his own shot creation: Thompson's % of 3s assisted in '16 was 92% compared to '06 Allen's 75%. Of course neither is elite -- '16 Steph, amazingly, was assisted on only 55% of his threes (!!) and '19 James Harden, the ultimate 3-point chucker, was assisted on only 16% of his threes. I think we're okay with our 2-guard settling somewhere in the middle here. Allen will work fine.

Actually I want to take a second and marvel at those percentages. 16% for Harden!! 92% for Thompson!! What the hell!! Okay I'm done.

SF: LeBron James / Kevin Durant

What is missing from LeBron? He's the most perfect basketball player we've ever seen, and hence both a very forgiving and very challenging player to work with in this exercise. Do we want to improve his already-strong shooting with someone like Bird? Improve his shooting and scoring with Durant (spoilers: yes)? Improve his defense (slightly?) with Kawhi or Bowen or something? Improve his passing with, uh, maybe no one because he's probably the best passing non-guard of all time?

Anyway, what we decided we wanted to do is improve his shooting and scoring. Durant has a very complete offensive game and patches up the closest thing LeBron has to a weakness: inconsistent three-point shooting. Durant isn't exactly the picture of consistency either, but his numbers skew better. Take it for what it is: a marginal improvement on what was already basically an ideal player.

PF: Dennis Rodman / Larry Bird

This one was tricky until I remembered that Bird was basically half PF and qualified. Rodman is basically an ideal player for this exercise: he's the best defensive PF ever and the best rebounding PF ever, so all we needed was the PF with the most complete offensive game, rebounds aside. But that's not immediately obvious -- guys like Garnett and Duncan are great but generally better on defense; Karl Malone was extremely productive but didn't have the range or the passing skill I'm looking for. So who's the answer, right? It's Bird. The answer is Bird. Passing, scoring, range. That's it. I did it.

(Swear to god I looked up Jokic's 3pt% before I remembered. Spoilers: it's not great. Also he's a center apparently.)

C: Shaquille O'Neal / Hakeem Olajuwon

Center is a complicated position. There's unending talent but it's not easy to divide the skillset up into anything more specific than like Offense / Defense. On the Offensive end, we essentially have two choices: take a guy with a lot of skill and decent range like Hakeem, or we take a steam engine who can just score two points fourteen times a game with extreme consistency. My sense is that we're a little better off going with Shaq here, if only because there is no center in history we'd rather have taking a shot from outside 3 feet than any of the other four guys we're starting here.

Defensively it's simpler. Hakeem or Ben Wallace? Honestly, my sense is that Wallace is a little better. That said, he doesn't have quite the same defensive versatility and his best years came playing with a defensive juggernaut stacked top to bottom with talent (the '04 Pistons had four of the top 25 and seven of the top 80 players by DWS that year, for a very rough approximation). Additionally, since we're only taking the best from each player, it's nice to get Hakeem's midrange (shaky though it may be) to pair with Shaq's dominance at the rim. Ideally we'll see some decent judgment here and probably not as many midrange shots as Hakeem took, but it's not clear where we're getting that good judgment from. Maybe Wallace is better just because he's never going to take midrange shots, and neither is Shaq. But I generally think that more skill is better than less, so let's maximize what we can.

Coda: If you buy into the "Ben Simmons is a Passing Genius" myth (I don't) then Simmons/Steph starts to look really fun, and it's current players. Harden/Kobe would be fun to watch if only to see what the shot selection looks like. Wilt/Wallace was a brief thought. Steph/Magic is absolutely disgusting (in a good way) on offense, and (in a bad way) on defense. Part of me wanted to use Garnett/Wallace, but it felt dishonest to characterize Garnett, who overwhelmingly played PF, as a center. That said, I trust Garnett's midrange more than Hakeem's.