Excerpt from The Athletic’s ‘The Basketball 100’: A game where ‘talent and will’ win out

This is the introduction to our book “The Basketball 100,” The Athletic’s definitive ranking of the 100 greatest NBA players of all time. The book, with a foreword by Charles Barkley, written by David Aldridge and John Hollinger with The Athletic NBA Staff, goes on sale this fall. Pre-order it here.

Basketball, my friend Ed Tapscott said, is a culture.

There is an unspoken camaraderie in the game, a syncopation, that links those who are the greatest at playing it with those who never played it at all, or not very well if they did. People of all ages come to the game, seeking, striving for . . . unity. Basketball connects communities, schools, races, genders. We are drawn to it, the notion that five people, working together, can create something magical. The game is unique among sports, one that allows—demands— improvisation within structure.

It is true whether you loved John Wooden’s UCLA teams, which dominated the college basketball landscape for a decade, or if you became an ardent supporter of Coach K and Duke—or if you were, and are, a fanatical supporter of a low-major school like my beloved American University.

It is equally true if you follow the pro game, vibing with the generational greatness of the Lakers and Celtics, or if you rock, have rocked, and will rock, with the Wizards and Kings. True hoop heads love basketball at all levels, finding the beauty in a midweek high school clash between fierce rivals who want, who need, to beat one another.

You come to love the people: the ushers and the vendors, the coaches and the athletic trainers, the always-hopeful fans, the mellow play-by-play voice on the radio (or, now, on your laptop/tablet/phone), passed from parent to child, and the public address announcer at the arena. “Julius . . . the Doctor . . . Errrrrrviiiing,” said Dave Zinkoff, in Philly, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and you can hear it even now, decades after the Doc and the Zink left the main stage, can’t you?

Many have written about the similarities between basketball and jazz, where the sorties of the sax player, the drum or piano solos mid-number, align perfectly within the strivings of the unit as a whole—just as Stephen Curry’s historic shooting range works perfectly off of Draymond Green’s ability to play downhill and make the right read. Individually, each is sublime; together, they won championships.

Their progenitors were many: Clyde Frazier’s cool and two-way excellence, pairing like AirPods and the iPhone, with Dave DeBusschere’s rugged rebounding and Willis Reed’s impenetrable post defense in New York. Or Earl “the Pearl” Monroe’s iconic spins and floaters, his unstoppable drives—meshing perfectly with Wes Unseld’s outlet passes and bone-crushing picks in Baltimore.

We should, while we’re here, pause to speak further of cities such as Baltimore, and Philadelphia, and Detroit, and Chicago—tough towns, working-class towns, which picked up the mantle laid (more accurately, taken from) by cities such as Rochester and Sheboygan and Syracuse. The story of pro basketball is parallel to the story of America in the second half of the twentieth century: a nation forced to come to grips with race, and racism, if it was to survive and endure. That reckoning was paid for in blood, and murder.

But the country lurched forward, in small but important ways, as Black college kids sat at lunch counters in the South and absorbed a nation’s evil—and as White college kids joined them in Freedom Summer bus rides through the most malevolent places.

Make no mistake, though—that discrimination did not respect state lines. When Martin Luther King went to Chicago in 1966 to lead a march to increase the minimum wage and to end segregated housing in the city, he was hit in the head with a rock. “I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate,” he said afterward.

But, things did get better, slowly, a bloody reward for so much sacrifice. Black men and women had more of their rights codified into law. More people of color entered the middle class, and had more opportunities. At the same time, Black players from HBCUs—Reed from Grambling, Monroe from Winston-Salem State, Sam Jones from North Carolina Central—were lifted up, while other Black players also began to receive opportunities to survive and thrive at predominantly White universities.

It is not a perfect comparison, to be sure. But the rise of Black players to dominance in the NBA more or less followed the civil rights timeline. It did not take long before the unwritten quota on the number of Black players both on a roster and on the floor at a given time, the province of owners leery of fan and season-ticket holder backlash, went the way of the dodo.

In this time, Bill Russell rose, a colossus, bending an entire league to his quiet, indefatigable will, determined to break barriers. He would not be denied, nor would he let you usurp his humanity. Talent and will, as they still do, won out. They have to.

This book is about that talent and will.

Inspiring, often maddening, never controllable, but never dull either.

If you truly love the game, you appreciate its history, and the stars of the early era, from George Mikan and Bob Cousy to Bob Pettit and Dolph Schayes. They were not plumbers and firemen; they were the best athletes of their generation, men to be respected.

And talent doesn’t stumble on race. Larry Bird was a damned virtuoso, a White man up from poverty just as paralyzing as the deprivation so many young Black men faced, but transcended, as they made their way to the NBA. No true basketball fan would deny Bird’s greatness, any more than you’d try to argue that Magic Johnson wasn’t breathtaking. Why do you think Magic and Bird first hated one another so fiercely, but then came to love each other so deeply?

Because they were the same guy. Look at one, and you see the other.

Nor does the culture stop at the border. As the world became decentralized, so did the game. Just as Michael Jordan begat Kobe Bryant, and Magic begat LeBron James, Hakeem Olajuwon begat Nikola Jokić. Dirk Nowitzki begat Luka Dončić. Pau Gasol begat Giannis Antetokounmpo. Argentina’s “Greatest Generation” was headlined by Manu Ginobili—who teamed with Tony Parker, born in Bruges, Belgium, and raised in France, and with Tim Duncan, a quiet kid from St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, to build a dynasty in South Texas.

The 100 people celebrated by this book brought fans out of their seats—and sometimes led their coaches to tear their hair out of their own heads. No one said dealing with geniuses was easy. And no one says these choices for the top 100 in basketball history are above reproach. Those of us who were on the selection committee are just people, full of flaws and contradictions. Tasked with picking the greatest players who ever stepped on a court, we made our choices. We could be wrong.

But we aren’t.

Excerpted from “The Basketball 100” published by William Morrow. Copyright © 2024 by The Athletic Media Company. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers

(Top illustration: Eamonn Dalton)