Who Is My Basketball GOAT?

Let me get the disclaimer out of the way, because the comments are coming either way.

This is not an objective ranking. Objective rankings do not exist in this argument — everybody weights rings, longevity, peak, era and vibes differently, and then calls the result “the numbers.” What follows is my podium, built from what I actually watched, loved and collected. The difference is that I am not going to invent a single statistic to justify it. Everything below is real, and sourced.

Also, full transparency: I run a website dedicated to Nick Van Exel and Derek Fisher. My objectivity left the building somewhere around 1994.

Jordan, and the Argument That Refuses to Die

I am aware that putting Michael Jordan first is the single least brave opinion in basketball. I do not care. Some things are first because they are first.

The Finals number is the one that ends conversations. Six trips, six wins, six Finals MVPs, never a Game 7. You can argue about the strength of the opposition, the expansion era, hand-checking, the shorts. You cannot argue with a résumé that has no losses in it.

Then there is the season that people forget: in 1988 he won Most Valuable Player and Defensive Player of the Year in the same year. Scoring champion and the best defender alive, simultaneously. Say that out loud and notice how ridiculous it sounds.

And internationally he did the two things that mattered: gold in 1984 as a college kid, then gold in 1992 with the Dream Team, the roster that exported this sport to the entire planet. Without that summer, half of Europe never picks up a basketball. Including, eventually, me.

Kobe: The Most Disrespected Name in the Debate

Here is the part where I get loud.

There is a version of this argument, repeated constantly online, where Kobe Bryant is a “top ten guy” and the GOAT conversation is a two-man race. That version is insane, and the numbers are right there.

Five rings, spread across two completely different eras of his own career: three alongside Shaquille O’Neal, then two more as the undisputed first option in 2009 and 2010, taking Finals MVP both times. He was also the 2008 MVP, a two-time scoring champion, and he posted 15 All-NBA selections.

But the accolade list is not why he is second on my podium. The era is.

The athleticism argument

Jordan dominated a league he was physically ahead of. Kobe played in a league that had spent fifteen years selecting for exactly his kind of athlete, at every position, on every roster. The average wing defender he faced in 2006 was a different physical proposition from the average wing defender in 1991 — bigger, faster, better coached, and specifically trained to stop guys who moved like him.

He scored 33,643 points anyway. That is the argument, and I have never heard a good answer to it.

The nights

• 81 points against Toronto, 22 January 2006. Twenty-eight of forty-six from the field, seven threes, eighteen free throws, fifty-five of them in the second half — from a fourteen-point halftime deficit. Sixty-six percent of his team’s 122 points, the highest share of a team total in league history
• 62 points through three quarters against Dallas, December 2005 — more than the entire Mavericks team had at that point. He sat out the fourth
• 60 points in his final NBA game, 13 April 2016, against Utah. Twenty years, and he closed the book by dropping sixty. Nobody has ever exited like that
• Two Olympic golds, Beijing 2008 with the Redeem Team and London 2012 — and in 2008 he was the one who took the closing possessions against Spain
• Six career 60-point games, and four All-Star Game MVPs, still a record

And then there is the part no statistic holds. The 4 a.m. workouts, the obsessive study, the entire vocabulary of effort that a generation of athletes in every sport now uses without attribution. Kobe turned discipline into a brand before that was a thing anyone did. Whatever you think of the ranking, that influence is real and it is still compounding.

Curry, and 132 Seconds in Paris

I need to be careful here, because Stephen Curry is the player who has made me suffer the most since Jordan retired, and I mean that as the highest compliment I have.

The regular-season case is well documented: four championships, two MVPs including the first unanimous one in league history in 2016, a Finals MVP in 2022, and a three-point record so far ahead of the field that the record itself stopped being interesting. He did not break the record. He broke the shot chart. Every team in the world now runs an offence that did not exist before him.

But the moment that moved him onto my podium happened at Bercy Arena, in my country, in front of a crowd screaming for the other team.

10 August 2024 — USA 98, France 87

Curry was 36 years old and had never played in an Olympic Games. He started the final by turning the ball over twice and missing his first three attempts from deep. Then he made eight of his next ten.

1. 2:57 remaining France cuts it to three

   A 7–0 run capped by a Victor Wembanyama tip makes it 82–79. Bercy is deafening. France is three points from the greatest night in its basketball history.

2. 2:47 Pump fake, one dribble right, splash

   Guerschon Yabusele goes flying. Curry steps into the top of the key and buries it. Breathing room.

3. 1:53 Left, fake, Batum flies by

   90–81. He starts pointing at his own chest before it lands.

4. 1:19 The third one, and the yell

   93–84. He skips down the floor shaking the USA across his jersey so the whole arena can read it.

5. 0:35 The Golden Dagger

   A shimmy between Evan Fournier and Nicolas Batum, from a distance that is frankly rude, and then the hands folded against the side of his head. Night night. Curry has since called it the best three-pointer of his career, ahead of everything he has made in the NBA.

Four threes in a span of two minutes and eleven seconds. Twenty-four points on eight of twelve from deep. And that came 48 hours after he went nine of fourteen from three against Serbia in the semi-final to erase an eleven-point fourth-quarter deficit — sixty points across the last two games of the tournament, both of them elimination games, at 36, on his Olympic debut.

Wembanyama was magnificent that night: 26 points, seven rebounds, eleven of nineteen shooting, the second-highest total anyone has ever put up against the United States in a gold medal game. It did not matter. One man decided it was over and it was over.

Why LeBron Isn’t in My Top Ten

Let me start by conceding everything, because a bad-faith argument is a boring argument.

That Finals record is the only one of those points that is a real argument rather than a preference, and I will happily admit that reaching ten Finals is itself a monumental achievement that most of the players on my list never got near.

The rest is taste, and I would rather say so than dress it up. I am a Lakers fan of a specific vintage: the Showtime echo, the Shaq-and-Kobe three-peat, the 2009 and 2010 teams with a certain point guard hitting a certain shot in Game 4 in Orlando. The 2020 title is a fact. It is just not my Lakers.

Four Through Ten, Briefly

Since you are going to ask, and since leaving this out would be cowardly:

• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — six titles, six MVPs, and the most unguardable single move ever invented
• Magic Johnson — the reason the Lakers are the Lakers, and a 42-point Finals game as a rookie playing center
• Tim Duncan — the most boring dominance in history, which is a compliment
• Larry Bird — three straight MVPs, and the trash talk to go with them
• Shaquille O’Neal — at his peak, an unsolvable problem. Three straight Finals MVPs
• Hakeem Olajuwon — the best footwork the position has seen, and he beat everyone he was supposed to
• Wilt Chamberlain — a hundred points. In one game. We will never see it again

Notice how many Lakers are in there. I contain no multitudes whatsoever.

What This Has to Do With Cardboard

Everything, actually. A GOAT list is a want list with more shouting.

The players you rank highest are the ones whose cards you would chase if money were no object, and the ones you defend hardest are the ones whose careers you actually lived through. That is exactly how a personal collection gets built — not from a spreadsheet of returns, but from the games you remember.

Which is why this site is about a second-round point guard from Kenosha and a role player from Little Rock rather than about the four names above. The GOAT debate is fun. The collection is personal.