This List Is Not Complete

Where’s Bob Lanier?

Whaddya mean Bob Lanier isn’t one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History, according to the list the league commissioned for its 50th anniversary?

Oh, Lanier didn’t win an NBA championship?

Patrick Ewing is on this select team, and he hasn’t won an NBA championship.

Oh, Lanier never got to the finals?

David Robinson is on the squad, and he’s never gotten to the finals.

Lanier had the misfortune of playing center at the same time as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Abdul-Jabbar cast a shadow so large that even a giant such as Lanier, with a size 22 shoe, got lost inside it. But Lanier was a great player. In his 10 seasons in Detroit--toiling for an undersized team, where he sometimes had 500 more rebounds than any of his teammates--Lanier averaged 23 points a game, comparable numbers to Ewing and Robinson.

So Lanier is on my top 50.

And so are Dan Issel, Connie Hawkins, David Thompson and George Yardley.

(That means I have to throw five guys off. And we’ll get to that later.)

Obviously, what we’re debating here are Nos. 45 to 50. I trust we can all agree on the top 10. If we can’t, as Wilbon says, I’m gonna have to start slapping somebody. Wilt and Russell. Oscar and West. Magic and Bird. Jordan and Julius. Elgin and Kareem.

We can probably agree all the way up to 35. Where it gets dicey is 40 and over. (Which is pretty much where life gets dicey, too.)

Here are my prejudices:

I am prejudiced toward the ABA. I loved that league with its spectacular swooping players and wild hairdos. Because the ABA never had a decent TV package, the league was a rumor for many years, so some of its greatest players never got the acclaim they deserved. Issel was a stone cold killer forward. He averaged 26 points a game in his six years in the ABA; to prove it was no fluke, Issel averaged 20 a game for nine more years in the NBA. Combine his ABA and NBA scoring and Dan Issel is No. 5 on the all-time list. Whaddya mean he’s not in the top 50?

I am prejudiced toward people who moved the game along. I am prejudiced toward people who thrilled me with their flash. I like flava. That’s why my top 50 absolutely, positively has to have Connie Hawkins and David Thompson. (Thankfully, the voters had enough sense to stick Pistol Pete Maravich on this list, or I’d have had to start slapping people.)

The lineage of Hang Time begins with Elgin Baylor, and then passes through Hawkins, Julius Erving and Thompson before it gets to Michael Jordan. If you connect the dots, you’ll see the evolution of the soaring, improvisational jazz of basketball. We wouldn’t have had a Doctor J without The Hawk; we wouldn’t have had His Airness without his in-state North Carolina homey, David Skywalker. I know Hawkins lost many of his greatest years to scandal, and Thompson lost many of his to drugs. But in their time they were simply unguardable. Hawkins had a wingspan like a condor, and Thompson’s elevator went higher than the one Juwan Howard wants to put in his home. An argument can be made that Thompson and Hawkins didn’t have sufficient longevity. But neither did Bill Walton, who is on this team-although I must admit there’s a groundswell to boot him.

I am prejudiced toward bald guys. So I was pleased to see Bob Pettit on the list, and I am chagrined not to see George Yardley, who led the NBA in scoring (27.8) the season before Wilt Chamberlain joined. There isn’t much homage paid to the pre-1960s players, with only George Mikan, Dolph Schayes, Bill Sharman and Paul Arizin on the list. Yardley played seven NBA seasons and was in six all-star games. (I can get away with putting Yardley in, because so few of you people saw him play that it’s like arguing about a 1954 Packard.)

And I am hopelessly prejudiced toward the New York Knickerbockers of my youth. So Dave DeBusschere, who had the heart of a lion, stays.

Before I kick five guys off, let me address some claims I rejected. Because I don’t think it’s only about scoring, I didn’t make room for Alex English, Dominique Wilkins, Lou Hudson, Walter Davis or Adrian Dantley, all terrific players. Bob McAdoo was a tougher call--McAdoo led the NBA in scoring three times! But I don’t see him as one of the best 50.

Then there are some players who must be recognized for helping make good teams into great teams-but who might not make the all-time top 50. These are the great complementary players, such as Dennis Johnson, Maurice Cheeks, Guy Rodgers, Gail Goodrich, Bobby Jones and Paul Silas.

Okay, let’s start booting people!

Get Shaquille O’Neal out o’ here! The guy has played four seasons in the NBA, and is in no way one of the top 50 players of all time yet. Here’s what Shaq has won so far: squadoosh. He films a hell of a Pepsi ad. But get him off this list. Let him wait for the 75th anniversary.

Get Clyde Drexler off too. This list is inordinately prejudiced toward the Dream Team. Of the original 12 Dreamers, Chris Mullin and Christian Laettner--the luckiest man since Ringo Starr--are the only players not on this team. Drexler is good, but he’s not this good.

Bill Sharman can be booted too. If K.C. Jones isn’t on the team, and his Celtics backcourt partner Sam is, then Cousy doesn’t need Sharman. (You could twist my arm and force me to boot Billy Cunningham or Dave Bing to let Issel in. But Cunningham could jump to the moon. And the only reason to snip Bing is so I can use the line: Bing-go!)

I’m not booting Walton. I hate him on TV, but on the court he was breathtaking. Granted, it was too brief a career, but so was Sandy Koufax’s and Gale Sayers’s. Here’s my big move: I’m booting James Worthy and Robert Parish. They’re lead pipe cinch Hall of Famers, and they should be. But top 50 of all time? Worthy benefited immensely by playing with Magic Johnson, the best all-around player of his era, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the best center. On another team, Worthy wouldn’t have been anywhere near as noteworthy as he was on the Lakers. The same holds for Parish. He was flanked by Larry Bird and Kevin McHale, and all together they are the greatest front line in NBA history. It’s a closer call with Parish than with Worthy, but you have to ask where would Parish have been if he’d played his whole career in Golden State, where he started. (In Oakland, you dummy.) His longevity and consistency is admirable. This is his 21st season. But Parish is 51 or 52, not 50. Hahaha, the joke’s on me. Actually, Parish is 43.