Best Basketball Player

A while back LeBron James made news by announcing he was the best basketball player ever. This led to arguments on TV, many over whether Michael Jordan had the better claim. (Some cynics wondered if the more interesting question was which of the two was the bigger jerk.)  To consider who is best at something, one must first decide what he means by being the best. When people call Tom Brady the best quarterback ever, they usually do not mean he is the most athletically talented or is  the best passer or has the best statistics. They generally mean he is the most successful quarterback ever, with success defined as being the starting quarterback on a league’s championship team.  By that standard the argument for him is a strong though not conclusive one with only Bart Starr and Otto Graham as his peers. 

Applying a similar standard to basketball gives an easy answer. Whatever one may think about who was the best in other ways, Bill Russell was indisputably the most successful basketball player of all time, if success is defined as being the  key player on a championship team. He led the Celtics to eleven championships in thirteen  years and probably would have made it twelve if he hadn’t  been injured in the finals one year. 

 James and Jordan have good cases if one judges by athletic ability and statistics. But so do Kareem Jabbar,   Oscar Robertson, Julius Erving,  Jerry West, and others.  However, for my money,  the best case probably belongs to Wilt Chamberlain. He was a remarkable athlete and physical specimen who put up impressive  statistics in scoring, rebounding, and minutes played per game. He holds the records for both most points per game (a little over 50) and most rebounds per game (over 27)  in a season.  He even once led the league in assists. Of course one thing he could not do often enough was beat Bill Russell, but neither could anyone else.