What This List Is Not
This list will not make traditional “arguments” for players. I won’t attempt to balance Kobe’s championships without Shaq, nor do I care about accolades like All-Star teams or the number of Hall of Fame teammates someone played with. I also don’t care how many rings a player won;
the very thing I’m trying to tease out is who provided the most lift. Sometimes that lift is good enough to win, sometimes it’s not.
There are no time machines either — it’s not about how players would do today if transported into the past or future. It’s about the impact each had in his own time over the course of a career.
What This List Is
This list also goes far beyond the box score — indeed, the box score is merely a reference for quantifying tendencies — so if you’re used to citing points per game and Win Shares, this will be a bit different.
Instead, this is a career-value, or CORP list;
it ranks the players who have provided the largest increase in the odds of a team winning championships over the course of their careers. This means that having great Finals moments or winning the hearts of fans with innovative passes is irrelevant. You can make a great list with those criteria, but that’s not what this exercise is intended to be.
This list is really about evaluating players based on “goodness,” not merely situational value.