Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

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• Top 6 Basketball Players of All Time

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• Michael Jordan

  Michael Jordan spent the bulk of his career with the Chicago Bulls across two separate three-peats — 1991-1993 and 1996-1998 — retiring and briefly returning to baseball in between, then closing out his playing days with two seasons for the Washington Wizards. Across that span he built a case, still widely argued as the strongest of anyone, for the single greatest basketball player ever to play the sport. The championship math alone is remarkable: six NBA titles, six Finals MVP awards, meaning he was never on a Bulls championship team without also being named the best player of that particular Finals. He added five regular-season MVP awards and ten scoring titles, both of which stand as NBA records — a level of sustained individual dominance layered directly on top of team success, rather than one coming at the expense of the other. Jordan's competitiveness became as much a part of his legend as his skill — a relentless, sometimes famously petty drive to win that fueled everything from practice intensity to Hall of Fame induction speeches. That edge is inseparable from how teammates, opponents, and historians describe what made him different from other elite scorers of his era. Jordan's cultural footprint extended well past the box score, too — the Air Jordan sneaker line he built with Nike became one of the most commercially successful athlete partnerships in sports history, and "greatest of all time" conversations in basketball still default to using his career as the baseline other candidates get measured against.

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• LeBron James

  LeBron James entered the NBA straight out of high school in 2003 as the first overall draft pick by his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers, and over more than two decades since has built the longest sustained run of elite, MVP-level play the league has ever seen — a career that's now spanned four different franchises: the Cavaliers (across two stints), the Miami Heat, the Los Angeles Lakers, and the Philadelphia 76ers. On February 7, 2023, James passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to become the NBA's all-time leading scorer, a record many assumed was effectively permanent given how long Abdul-Jabbar had held it. James has since pushed the record well past 40,000 career points, a total that reflects both his individual scoring ability and a remarkable, largely injury-free level of durability across 20-plus seasons. James has won four NBA championships with three different franchises — two with Miami (2012, 2013), one with Cleveland (2016), and one with the Lakers (2020) — along with four regular-season MVP awards. The 2016 title is often singled out specifically: Cleveland came back from a 3-1 Finals deficit against a 73-win Golden State team, delivering the city's first major sports championship in over five decades. Few athletes in any sport have managed to remain at an elite competitive level as long as James has, and the ongoing debate over whether he or Michael Jordan is the greatest player in basketball history has become one of the sport's defining, unresolved arguments.

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• Bill Russell

  Bill Russell played his entire 13-year NBA career with the Boston Celtics, and in that span won 11 NBA championships — a total unmatched by any player in any major North American professional sport, before or since. Two of those titles came while Russell was also serving as Boston's head coach, making him the first Black head coach in NBA history when he was appointed in 1966. Russell wasn't a dominant scorer by modern standards — 15.1 points per game for his career — but his defensive and rebounding impact reshaped how the sport was played. He averaged 22.5 rebounds per game across his career, led the league in rebounding four times, and won five regular-season MVP awards despite never leading the league in scoring, a genuinely rare combination that reflects how much of his value came from defense, rebounding, and winning rather than individual box-score totals. Before turning pro, Russell won two NCAA championships at the University of San Francisco and captained the gold-medal-winning 1956 U.S. Olympic team — an amateur résumé that already suggested the winning pattern that would define his professional career. Following Russell's death in 2022, the NBA retired his No. 6 jersey league-wide, the first time any number has been retired across every team simultaneously — a fitting, singular honor for a player whose championship total remains the standard nobody else has come close to touching.

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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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More in Sports

• Robert Killian

  Robert Killian, a former U.S. Army Green Beret with more than 12 years of active service, won the Spartan Race World Championship in 2015 despite having just four races of OCR experience at the time, then won it again in 2019 for two career Spartan World titles. His path to obstacle racing ran through elite military and endurance competition rather than combat sports: he was a high school track star and collegiate runner who won the military division of the Ironman World Championship in Kona in 2009, was named Army Athlete of the Year in 2010, and won the grueling 68-hour Best Ranger Competition in 2016. At World's Toughest Mudder, Killian won the event three times and placed second overall (and first American) at the 2017 edition, completing 105 miles in 24 hours, one of the highest single-event distance totals recorded in the format's history. His combination of two Spartan World Championships and his background as a Best Ranger Competition champion and military Ironman world champion has made Killian one of the most distinctively credentialed competitors in obstacle course racing's history.

• Lindsay Webster

  Lindsay Webster won her first Spartan Race World Championship in 2017, then added titles in 2018, 2021, and 2022 — the 2022 win making her the first-ever four-time Spartan World Champion, male or female, at the time she achieved it. Along the way she set the sport's record for most consecutive Spartan wins with 17 in a row, and her 2021 title came alongside partner Ryan Atkins, who won the men's championship the same year in Abu Dhabi. Her combination of strong trail running speed and reliable execution on OCR's more technically demanding upper-body obstacles gave her a genuinely complete competitive profile that sustained her dominance across changing eras of the sport's growth. Her combination of a record four Spartan World Championships and her 17-race consecutive win streak has made Webster, by most accounts, the most decorated woman in obstacle course racing history.

• Hunter McIntyre

  Hunter McIntyre is a six-time obstacle course racing world champion by his own team's count, having first entered the sport almost by accident — he and a group of friends had loosely talked about doing a Spartan Race together, and he ended up the only one who actually finished it. He went on to become a three-time Hyrox World Champion as well, extending his competitive dominance into that separate hybrid fitness-racing discipline and becoming one of the few athletes to hold major titles in both OCR and Hyrox simultaneously. His path to elite athletic performance ran through bodybuilding and strength training before OCR, giving him a physical profile built for heavy carrying and climbing obstacles that distinguished him from more purely running-focused competitors, and his outspoken public persona helped introduce the sport to broader fitness audiences. His combination of six OCR world championships and his separate three-time Hyrox World Championship has made McIntyre one of the most recognizable and commercially significant figures across obstacle and hybrid fitness racing.

• Amelia Boone

  Amelia Boone, nicknamed "the Queen of Pain," won World's Toughest Mudder three times — in 2012, 2014, and 2015 — with her 2014 title coming just eight weeks after major knee surgery, a comeback timeline that became one of the defining stories of her career. She competed at an elite level while working full-time as a practicing corporate attorney, a combination that gave obstacle course racing a distinctive public profile well beyond its core competitive community during her prime. After shifting focus toward ultrarunning in 2016, Boone suffered a femoral stress fracture that put her on crutches for three months, then a cascading series of additional injuries — a sacral stress fracture, a fully displaced second metatarsal, and three separate heel stress fractures — totaling six bone stress injuries across three years. Her combination of three World's Toughest Mudder titles, including one won eight weeks post-surgery, and her later public account of recovering from six separate bone stress injuries has made Boone one of the most significant and candidly documented figures in obstacle racing's history.

• Ryan Atkins

  Ryan Atkins won the 2016 OCR World Championship in the 3km distance and later took the 2023 OCR World Championship Male 15K title, a span of major championships nearly a decade apart that reflects an unusually long competitive prime for the sport. He won the 2021 Spartan World Championship alongside partner Lindsay Webster, giving the Guelph, Ontario-based couple simultaneous titles in the same event and making them one of OCR's most publicly recognized competitive pairings before Webster went on to become the sport's most decorated woman. His background as a competitive adventure racer before focusing on obstacle course racing gave him a multi-discipline endurance foundation, and the OCR World Championships specifically returned to his home region of Collingwood, Ontario during his competitive prime, reflecting the sport's continued growth in the areas where its top athletes trained. His combination of OCR World Championships seven years apart and his 2021 Spartan World Championship alongside Lindsay Webster has made Atkins one of the most historically significant men's competitors in the sport.