Wilt Chamberlain

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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.

• 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.

• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar entered the NBA in 1969 after a legendary UCLA career, spent six seasons with the Milwaukee Bucks, then moved to the Los Angeles Lakers in 1975, where he'd spend the rest of his 20-season career anchoring the "Showtime" era teams of the 1980s. His signature move, the skyhook — an ambidextrous, sweeping hook shot released from well over most defenders' reach — proved close to unblockable across two full decades of professional basketball, contributing to a career .559 field goal percentage. He used it to break Wilt Chamberlain's all-time scoring record on April 5, 1984, a record Abdul-Jabbar himself would go on to hold for nearly four decades until LeBron James passed him in 2023. Abdul-Jabbar won six NBA championships — one with Milwaukee in 1971, and five more with the Lakers — and six regular-season MVP awards, still the most of any player in NBA history. That MVP total alone is a good shorthand for how long he stayed at an elite level: his six MVPs were spread across 1971 to 1980, meaning he was still the league's best player nearly a decade after his rookie season. Abdul-Jabbar's longevity is arguably as impressive as his peak — 38,387 career points scored across two decades and two very different eras of NBA basketball, from the run-and-gun 1970s to the more physical, defense-oriented 1980s, without ever losing the shot that made him close to unguardable.

• 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.

• 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.