The debate around greatness in sports is never-ending. Everyone has their own opinion. Somewhere along the way we decide what makes a player great in our head, and often we attach a name with that idea. Is it Brady in football? For the longest, I was one of the many who looked at him as a system QB, but maybe I was wrong. Is Ali the greatest boxer of all time? Or is he just the greatest in his class or era?

There is no way to determine this for sure, especially when it comes to comparing athletes across generations. The games evolve, the science around fitness evolves, and the attention that we pay athletes has gone from huddling around a radio to hear a blow by blow of the fight, to watching the game on your HDTV, watching highlights on your phone, checking your fantasy team lineup, and seeing who your favorite players follow on Instagram to determine if they’re about to go ring chasing.

However, that doesn’t stop us from asking. Who is the greatest of all time? Who is the G.O.A.T?

For me, the only sport where I care about the answer is basketball. My first true love and the game I’ve been playing since as far back as I can remember. I have a picture of myself from when I was 3 where I was dribbling a soccer ball like it was a basketball. I know who I’ve always accepted as the G.O.A.T, Michael Jordan. 6 for 6 in the Finals. Dominated his era. Dominated to the point that he left in the middle of his domination, played another sport, then came back and dominated some more before getting bored with it again. That’s the story I told in my head anyway.

Now, 18 years into the reign of Lebron James, I’ve seen every moment of his career. I’ve seen the struggles early on, and him getting to the Finals before he was supposed to. I’ve seen him at his lowest in 2011. I watched him at his highest in the 2012 playoff run. I’ve seen him go back home to Cleveland and redeem himself. And now I’ve seen him bring another title to Los Angeles. Perhaps I’ve seen too much of Lebron and not enough Michael.

In my old age I’ve come to want to appreciate Lebron more. I often say that he and Wilt were the most physically gifted basketball players but that Kareem or Jordan were the greatest. And that brings us to the key point of this piece. What is “greatness?”

Greatness

To me, greatness isn’t how talented a player is. It’s not, “who would win if these two players played 1-on-1?” Greatness is about your ability, of course, AND what you were able to do with that ability. What you were able to accomplish. Statistically, did you dominate the box score? Did you dominate your era? Did you stake your claim as the best when compared to your peers at the time? Did you win?

All of these things are important, especially when comparing players across eras. I hoped to design a methodology that gave us players from the 40’s and 50’s as well as active players. I wanted this to be educational for me, and for my audience.

I wanted to come up with a formula, and if you know me you know this is something I do. For years I worked at a formula for predicting the NCAA tournament and I got really good at predicting who would win, but would never get the upsets right. This is a bit easier. There are no real variables. The data is there and it’s not changing right now. Kareem will not have to play Shaq to prove me right later. Whatever the formula says is the end of it, but I had to decide what mattered and what didn’t.

Now going into year two, some small changes were made. I was very pleased with the results but I have had the opportunity to rethink some things so I’ll go over the changes that were made from year one to year two.

*** = Changed for year 2

Who was considered?

I could not look at every single player in NBA history. There have been well over 4000 so I had to come up with a way to determine who to consider. These are my rules for consideration.

• 3 All-NBA/ABA Selections***
• MVP winner
• Finals MVP winner
• Finals Runner-up (the best player) from 1977-Present
• Defensive Player of the Year winner
• Top 50 in points per game (regular season and playoffs)***
• Top 50 in total points (regular season and playoffs)***

In the end, only 178 players qualified.

The Points system

I wanted to come up with a cool acronym like PIPM or whatever but we’re just going to call this the GOAT factor. My goal was to create a system where 1000 points put you at GOAT status and somehow I managed to pull that off. I’m honestly truly amazed at how well it worked out.

Here is the points system and some of my logic.

Awards

• MVP: 100 points (MVP winners from the ABA and NBA pre-merger received a full MVP share from 1967-1976).
• Finals MVP from 1984-Present: 50 points (not awarded until 1969) Used the info at this link for the years prior: http://analyticsgame.com/nba/projected-finals-mvps-from-1947-to-1968.html
• Finals MVP before 1984: 25 points (Playoffs were 2 or 3 rounds for the best teams. These players received the full 50 points last year)***
• Finals Runner-Up MVP from 1984-Present: 25 points (Playoffs went from 8 teams to 16 this year. Loser still won a 3 round tournament)
• Finals Runner-Up MVP from 1977-1983: 12.5 points (First few years after the NBA-ABA merger)
• 1st Team All NBA/ABA: 20 points
• 2nd Team All NBA/ABA: 10 points
• 3rd Team All NBA: 6.67 points
• Defensive Player of the Year: 15 points (not awarded until 1983) Used Defensive win shares to fill in the gaps. Check the added awards companion piece for the full list.
• 1st Team All Defense: 3 points (Not awarded until 1969 in the NBA. Not awarded until 1973 in the ABA and only one team. Also in the added awards sheet)
• 2nd Team All Defense: 1.5 points Used Defensive win shares for All Defense before 1969. I tried to use the top 3 bigs and 2 guards most years, a few years where I accepted a SF as a guard since the guards were so low.

League Leaderboard

Much like MVP and Defensive Player of the Year reward a player for rising above the rest, I wanted to award players who led the 3 statistical categories that were tracked since 1950 with a little bonus. Again, I wanted to make sure that guys were rewarded for dominating their era. I’m not interested in deciding if George Mikan would beat Shaq 1-on-1.

• Scoring champ: 5 points
• Assist Champ: 3 points.*** (was 1.5 point last year)
• Rebound Champ: 1.5 points *Rebounds not tracked until 1950-1951. Asterisk for the 40’s guys if they end up close to another. 6 total points missed out on. 

Stats

This part of it gets a bit tricky but I hope I explained it in a way that makes sense. I wanted to award those who ended up at the top of the league in the 3 categories that have counted for the past 70 years and I wanted to make sure first that performance outweighed longevity but that longevity was definitely rewarded. Hence Playoffs being worth more than regular season, and PPG being worth more than Total points.

• Playoffs PPG: Top 50 players considered. The number 1 guy received 100 points for this. The number two guy would get 98, number 3, 96 and so on.)
• Career PPG: Top 50**, same concept as above (number 1, 60 points, number 2 58.8, number 3, 57.6 and down by 1.2 points from there). (Only counted the top 30 last year)
• Career total points in the playoffs: Top 50** (number 1 received 25 points, number two, 24.5 and so on.) (**Only counted top 25 last year)
• Career Total points: Top 50**. (number 1 = 15 points (goes down by 0.3 from there). Only counted top 15 last time.
• Career APG: Top 50** Number 1 received 10 points, number two received 9.8. This value doubled from last year to make assists worth more than rebounds.) Also increased the number of players to earn from this spot.
• Career RPG: Top 50** Number one received 5 points, number 2 received 4.9, down by .1 from there.

*Before you @ Me*

1. My goal is to be able to revisit and tweak this in the future, especially after getting some feedback.
2. RINGS don’t mean a thing. I did not want to get caught up in counting rings. I wanted to award individual performance, not team results.
3. There are going to be some guys who we’ve always been told were top 50 that didn’t make the cut. Supporting casts behind a great player were not rewarded heavily in this formula. I think I’m ok with that.
4. Bias is inevitable right? Well, I did my best to avoid being biased about what to include and how to weight things. I made sure I decided what was important to me before I started doing any calculations. My bias would have me moving guys around based on the results but I truly do love how it came out.
5. This will be updated every year as there are plenty of active guys who will be changing this list as soon as next year based on where they landed and likely new guys who qualify.
6. ENJOY. This is meant to be fun and spark conversation. If you have suggestions holler at me. I’m all ears.

-Bibs

Companion Pieces

The Added Awards

The Adjustments