One of the things I have been chipping away at these last few months is bringing back the old TheSportsJury content from the days when the site was actually alive. That was before I sold the domain to a ticket reseller who never understood the community we built or how to keep it breathing. Digging through the archive, I found my old “10 Greatest NBA Players of All Time” list from 2010.
Sixteen years is a long time, and brother, what a sixteen years it was.
What we have watched since 2010
When I wrote the first version of this list, LeBron had just taken his talents to South Beach and none of those Heat had a ring yet. They lost to Dallas in 2011, which everybody conveniently forgets, then came back and won it in 2012 and again in 2013. That second one should never have happened. The Spurs had the 2013 title in their hands. The yellow ropes were already going up around the floor in Miami, the Larry O’Brien trophy was being wheeled toward the court, and San Antonio was up five with under thirty seconds left in Game 6. Title number five for Duncan. What would have been his fourth Finals MVP. Then Ray Allen backpedaled into the right corner and buried the single most heartbreaking shot I have ever watched, the Heat stole Game 6, and they took Game 7 two nights later. I still think about that one more than I would like to admit.
Here is why I love this sport, though. The Spurs did not sulk. They went and took it back. The 2014 Finals were a revenge tour from the opening tip. San Antonio took that same Heat team apart in five games, played the prettiest team basketball you will ever see, and a young Kawhi Leonard walked off with the Finals MVP. That loss is what sent LeBron packing back to Cleveland to finish what he had promised to start.
Then the whole league changed colors. Golden State came out of the West and swallowed the sport whole. Steph Curry rewrote what a jump shot was allowed to be, and the Warriors won it in 2015. The next year they went 73-9, the best regular season any team has ever put together, better than Jordan’s Bulls on paper, and they had the title in the bag up 3-1 in the Finals. Then LeBron and Kyrie ripped it right out of their hands. The Block. The shot over Curry. Cleveland’s first championship ever. The greatest regular season in history, and the parade ended up in the wrong city.
Golden State answered the only way it knew how, by adding Kevin Durant and steamrolling everyone for two more rings. Then the injuries finally caught them in 2019, and Kawhi, by then a one-man wrecking crew, carried the Toronto Raptors to the first title in franchise history. A championship on two coasts, in two countries, from a man who barely says ten words at a podium.
2020 was the strange one, and the sad one. The world shut down, the season finished inside a bubble in Orlando with no fans in the building, and the Lakers won it for LeBron and Anthony Davis. That whole season carried a weight, because we lost Kobe in January, and nobody who lived through it will ever forget where they were. The next summer Giannis and the Bucks broke through for Milwaukee’s first title since 1971, sealed with a 50-point closeout game for the ages.
After that the carousel kept spinning. Curry got another one. Jokic and Denver got their first. Boston banked number 18. And last June, Oklahoma City finished its long rebuild, with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander sweeping MVP and Finals MVP and beating Indiana in a Game 7.
Which brings us to a few weeks ago, and I am not over it yet. My Spurs were back on the big stage, and they led for what felt like the entire series. Go back and count the minutes if you do not believe me, it is north of 70 percent. And they lost in five. To the Knicks. New York clawed out of a double-digit hole in every single game it won, Jalen Brunson dropped 45 in the closeout, and the one franchise that had not won since 1973 finally got its parade down the Canyon of Heroes. Fifty-three years. And look, it is nice for New York to have a reason to come together, because the city could use one. But after the way their fans behaved during that series, swarming and assaulting Spurs supporters, some of them elderly, and pelting eggs at Victor Wembanyama, a 22-year-old kid, on his way into the building? Nah. I cannot get there. They are exactly what everybody says they are. The Rats of New York. And the Commissioner ought to be ashamed of himself for sitting on his hands and doing nothing, because all that silence does is guarantee the next situation is uglier than this one was.
That is the backdrop. Careers ended. Legends we were still watching back then are retired statues now, and a couple are gone for good. All of it is why the names below moved. For the guys who played before the league handed out a Finals MVP or picked All-Defense teams, I put an asterisk next to the name so nobody loses points for being born too early.
10. Larry Bird
- Titles: 3 | MVP: 3 | Finals MVP: 2
- All-Star: 12 | All-NBA: 10 (9x 1st) | All-Defense: 3
Three MVPs in a row, and only two other men in history have done that. Bird drops a couple spots from the old list, but understand what that means: even falling, he is still one of the ten best to ever do it. The shooting, the passing, the trash talk he backed up every single night. He stays.
9. Magic Johnson
- Titles: 5 | MVP: 3 | Finals MVP: 3
- All-Star: 12 | All-NBA: 10 (9x 1st) | All-Defense: 0
Five rings, and he won a Finals as a rookie playing center because Kareem was hurt. That actually happened. A 6-foot-9 point guard who made everybody around him richer. The reason he slides is the company on this list, not anything Magic did wrong.
8. Shaquille O’Neal
- Titles: 4 | MVP: 1 | Finals MVP: 3 (in a row)
- All-Star: 15 | All-NBA: 14 | All-Defense: 3
Here is the reassessment I feel strongest about. The longer I watch modern basketball, the more obvious it gets: Shaq would have wrecked any era, including this one. Drop prime Shaq into the 2026 NBA, with these guards and these rules and these smaller front lines, and I think he averages 40-plus points, 25-plus rebounds, and 7 blocks a night. Who guards him? Nobody. They would change the rulebook again just to slow him down, same as they did the first time. Three straight Finals MVPs and the most physically dominant stretch the sport has seen. He climbs.
7. Wilt Chamberlain*
- Titles: 2 | MVP: 4 | Finals MVP: 1
- All-Star: 13 | All-NBA: 10 (7x 1st) | All-Defense: 2
A 100-point game. A 50.4-point average for a whole season. A year where he averaged better than 48 minutes a night, which math says is impossible until you remember he never came off the floor, overtimes included. The numbers read like typos. Wilt slips behind the modern bigs only because the titles column is light, and on my ballot rings still carry the day.
6. LeBron James
- Titles: 4 | MVP: 4 | Finals MVP: 4
- All-Star: 22 | All-NBA: 21 (record, 13x 1st) | All-Defense: 6
Let me be fair to the man before anybody accuses me of ducking him. LeBron’s résumé is staggering: four MVPs, four rings, four Finals MVPs, the all-time scoring record, and more All-NBA nods than any human who ever laced them up. He is the best blend of size, brain, and stamina the league has produced, and he did it for more than two decades without his body quitting on him. So why sixth and not first? Because longevity is not the same thing as peak, the finals record has more losses than wins in it, and the names ahead of him simply bent their teams to their will in a way I never quite felt from LeBron. He is an all-timer. He is not my number one, and it is not close.
5. Bill Russell*
- Titles: 11 | MVP: 5 | Finals MVP: N/A
- All-Star: 12 | All-NBA: 11 | All-Defense: 1
Eleven championships in thirteen seasons. Read that again and try to find a way to argue with it. The only reason Russell is fifth and not higher is the era: he never had to fight through twenty other contenders or a 100-game gauntlet to get there. But the man won everything, every year, and the league literally named the Finals MVP trophy after him. If your tiebreaker is winning, Russell breaks every tie. Mine just weighs a few other things too.
4. Kobe Bryant
- Titles: 5 | MVP: 1 | Finals MVP: 2
- All-Star: 18 | All-NBA: 15 (11x 1st) | All-Defense: 12 (9x 1st)
Five titles. Eighteen All-Star trips. Fifteen All-NBA teams, eleven of them First Team. And twelve All-Defensive selections, which is the part casual fans forget, because Kobe took pride in guarding the other team’s best player and shutting him down. Eighty-one points in a single game. A farewell night where a 37-year-old dropped 60. The closest thing my generation got to seeing Jordan again, right down to the footwork and the meanness. I will say this plainly: in my book, Kobe and the man right above him are basically interchangeable. I could wake up tomorrow and flip them. Today, by a hair, Duncan’s team record edges it.
3. Tim Duncan
- Titles: 5 | MVP: 2 | Finals MVP: 3
- All-Star: 15 | All-NBA: 15 (tied 2nd-most ever) | All-Defense: 15 (most ever)
This is the biggest jump on the ballot, and it is the one I will defend the loudest. Look at what Duncan actually did across nineteen seasons. His teams made the playoffs every single year he played. Every one. They won at least 50 games every season too, with one exception: the lockout-shortened 1999 run, and all they did that year was win the championship. Fifteen All-NBA teams, tied for the second-most in league history. Fifteen All-Defensive teams, more than anybody who ever played. He was great on both ends from day one until the day he walked away, and he never missed the dance once. People called him boring because he did not yell or sell sneakers. I call him the most complete player I ever watched. The quiet ones age the best, and Duncan has aged like nobody else on this list.
2. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
- Titles: 6 | MVP: 6 (most ever) | Finals MVP: 2
- All-Star: 19 | All-NBA: 15 | All-Defense: 11
Six MVPs, which still leads the league and probably always will. Nineteen All-Star appearances over twenty seasons. The all-time scoring crown for almost forty years, built on a shot nobody could block and nobody since has bothered to copy. Kareem held up at the highest level into his forties. The skyhook was a cheat code, and he pulled the trigger on it for two decades.
1. Michael Jordan
- Titles: 6 | MVP: 5 | Finals MVP: 6 (most ever)
- All-Star: 14 | All-NBA: 11 (10x 1st) | All-Defense: 9
Six trips to the Finals, six rings, six Finals MVPs. Never a Game 7 in the Finals. Never lost the series, never even let it get that far. Add the scoring titles, the Defensive Player of the Year, the steals, and the simple fact that he turned a whole sport into appointment television, and you have a case that does not have a counter. He is the standard everyone else on this list gets measured against. He is number one, and I do not expect to type anything different for the rest of my life.
The Ballot at a Glance
| Rank | Player | Titles | MVP | Finals MVP | All-Star | All-NBA | All-Defense |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Michael Jordan | 6 | 5 | 6 | 14 | 11 | 9 |
| 2 | Kareem Abdul-Jabbar | 6 | 6 | 2 | 19 | 15 | 11 |
| 3 | Tim Duncan | 5 | 2 | 3 | 15 | 15 | 15 |
| 4 | Kobe Bryant | 5 | 1 | 2 | 18 | 15 | 12 |
| 5 | Bill Russell* | 11 | 5 | N/A | 12 | 11 | 1 |
| 6 | LeBron James | 4 | 4 | 4 | 22 | 21 | 6 |
| 7 | Wilt Chamberlain* | 2 | 4 | 1 | 13 | 10 | 2 |
| 8 | Shaquille O’Neal | 4 | 1 | 3 | 15 | 14 | 3 |
| 9 | Magic Johnson | 5 | 3 | 3 | 12 | 10 | 0 |
| 10 | Larry Bird | 3 | 3 | 2 | 12 | 10 | 3 |
* Played all or part of his career before the league awarded a Finals MVP or named All-Defensive teams.
What sixteen years taught me
Here is the thing I keep coming back to. The older I get, the more I realize how lucky my generation was. Elder millennials grew up watching some of the best basketball ever played, and we got the handoffs in real time. We caught the tail of Magic and Bird, watched Jordan take the torch and run with it, then watched that torch pass again to Kobe and Duncan. Five all-timers, back to back to back to back to back. There have been good nights in the LeBron years, plenty of them. But nothing that hit the way the Magic, Bird, Jordan, Kobe, and Duncan eras hit.
It has been ten years now since Duncan and Kobe walked off the floor for the last time, both of them in 2016. And for Kobe it became forever in 2020, gone far too soon, far too young. Writing their names this high on the list felt less like a ranking and more like a thank-you.
So no, I am not moving Jordan. The LeBron crowd spent the better part of twenty years trying to talk the rest of us into crowning him number one. I respect the loyalty. But the facts sit right there in the table, and the facts do not care how loud the argument gets.
