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Magic Johnson
Magic Johnson was drafted first overall by the Los Angeles Lakers in 1979 after leading Michigan State to the NCAA championship, and spent his entire NBA career with the Lakers, becoming the on-court engine of the "Showtime" era alongside Kareem Abdul-Jabbar through the 1980s. At 6-foot-9, Johnson played point guard at a size that simply hadn't been seen at that position before, redefining what the role could look like — a player big enough to rebound and finish near the rim, but with the court vision and passing instincts of a much smaller floor general. He retired with 10,141 career assists, the highest total in NBA history at the time, along with 17,707 points and 6,559 rebounds. Johnson won five NBA championships and three regular-season MVP awards, along with three Finals MVP awards — including one won as a rookie in the 1980 Finals, where he famously started at center in place of an injured Abdul-Jabbar and scored 42 points. He announced his HIV diagnosis in 1991 and retired that year, then returned for the 1992 All-Star Game and the gold-medal-winning 1992 Olympic "Dream Team," and briefly again as a player in 1996. Johnson's rivalry with Larry Bird's Celtics through the 1980s is widely credited with driving a surge in the NBA's national popularity — two era-defining players and franchises pushing each other, and the league's television ratings, to new heights across the decade.
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Wilt Chamberlain
Wilt Chamberlain's rookie season alone would be a career highlight for most players — he won MVP in 1960 after averaging staggering numbers, and by 1961-62 he was putting up a 50.4 points-per-game season average, still the highest scoring average in a single NBA season by a wide margin and one of the more untouchable records in the sport. The signature moment of that 1961-62 season came on March 2, 1962: a 100-point game against the New York Knicks, played at Hersheypark Arena in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Chamberlain shot 36-for-63 from the field and 28-for-32 from the free-throw line to reach the total — a mark that's stood for over six decades with no player getting closer than about 20 points to it since. Chamberlain won two NBA championships, one with the Philadelphia 76ers in 1967 and one with the Los Angeles Lakers in 1972, where he was also named Finals MVP. He added four regular-season MVP awards, seven scoring titles, and eleven rebounding titles across his career, including an NBA-record 55 rebounds in a single game in November 1960. Chamberlain's combination of scale and stamina was as remarkable as any of his scoring totals — he averaged 48.53 minutes per game (more than a full 48-minute game, accounting for overtime) during that 1961-62 season and never fouled out of a single game in his entire career, an endurance record that's as unusual as any scoring number he ever put up.
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