With the NBA Finals and the Stanley Cup Finals both wrapped up, Hill 364 is looking for something a little more exciting to cover than the middle slog of a laborious MLB season. There’s a gigantic cloud hanging over the NFL’s future; the possibility of an NBA lockout is all too real as well. So with the prospects of our dearest sports in jeopardy, and since Game 69 of a 162-game season does not necessarily scream excitement, we’re going to look back. Our next series of posts will concern the All-Time Top-10 players in each the NBA, the NFL, MLB, the NHL, and the tennis world.
I can’t guarantee that we accomplished it, but the main goal of our Top-10s was simply to rank the ten best players in each of our chosen sports. So we’re definitely going to want to hear what you guys (our readers) have to think about how well we did, who we missed, and so forth.
Other goals included putting into perspective what it means to be truly great in a sport, not just good, but worthy of being called a top-10 all-time player. Another goal was to have fun, to look at the athletes we love and to see in full their accomplishments, accolades, and what we thought of them as players. The final goal was to examine history and put athletes in a proper historical perspective. Our lists all span different eras, so we get to talk about athletes of yesteryear who oftentimes get forgotten. In sports it's important to remember the past, and it's a hard—but fun—task to compare past players to the present ones and to the future.
Adam will contribute our first two lists, the Top-10 NBA players and the Top-10 NFLers. Then Eric will present his MLB Top-10. We follow that up with Hill 364's first guest post. If ever we have a question about hockey, the first guy we go to is our buddy, Matt. So when it came time to think about the Top-10 NHL players ever, it dawned on us that Matt was the only guy qualified to impart such a list. We are glad to share his contribution. Thanks Matt. For our final Top-10, Adam will examine the ten best tennis players ever. To add an interesting wrinkle, the list will include both male and female players.
If you are interested in the nuts and bolts of how we made our lists, read on. If not, we look forward to starting a conversation in our lists’ welcoming comment sections.
We hope you enjoy our next series of posts, the Top-10s.
--from @AdamHocking and @jeuneski
Adam on his NBA Top-10: When judging greatness in a sport, the numbers are of course integral to the evaluation process, but certainly not the only thing to consider. If it were just about stats, Wilt Chamberlain would be without parallel the best of all-time. If it were just about rings, Bill Russell would hold the title.
Greatness in sport is also about the feeling people get watching a certain player. Michael Jordan instilled fear in opponents and opposing fans like no other player. Magic Johnson entertained us like no one we’ve seen before or since. Tim Duncan bored us to death but just kept winning. So my judgment is undoubtedly subjective in that regard.
How hard was a player to guard, to prepare for? What did he do in the biggest, most crucial moments? In his time did the player have equals, or was he peerless? If you were starting a team and each player on the list would have the exact same talent around them, which player would you select to take that team to a championship?
One final note is that I do give preference to more recent players simply because in the 1960’s, 70’s, and part of the 80’s, the NBA was just a different league where many more shots were taken and more points scored. So a player from that era will obviously have more impressive scoring and rebounding averages. It’s not an enormous portion of my analysis, but it’s important and I consider it when making my rankings.
Adam on his NFL Top-10: First, let’s establish what “greatest” means in the context of this list. It does not necessarily mean the most impactful player; otherwise the list would consist of ten quarterbacks, the position that handles the ball more than any other. NFL greatness, for me, is defined by dominance at the position you played, regardless of what that position was (unless you were a kicker). This means that if you were clearly the best safety of all-time, you have a greater chance to make the list than the 8th-best quarterback. There are 22 players on the field at any given time, and my goal is to pick the ten players that most dominated games relative to others at their position.
Part of ranking these players will come down to statistics, and part of it will be the “wow factor” or as I might call it, “the Barry Sanders factor.” How much a defense or offense had to gameplan for a certain player, how that player impacted the game relative to others at his position, and how frightened you were if that player was going against your favorite team: these are the criteria I will focus on.
Eric on his MLB Top-10: In order to fully take in the game’s greatest players ever, I had to prepare this list almost entirely on statistics. But since baseball always has been a statistically-driven sport, I stand firmly behind using stats entirely as comparison.
I started by making my shortlist of the greatest baseball players of all-time. Based partly on stats and partly just on players I like, the shortlist ended up being 67 names long.
To single out the greatest players on my shortlist, I dove into the vast statistical world of baseball-reference.com. Taking the seventeen stats I deemed most important, each player's career total in each category is divided by the average of everyone on my shortlist, and then those ratios are weighted by how important I deem the stat they correspond to. That gave me a score which provides the Top-10, except I made two personal choices: I took out two pitchers, Roger Clemens and Nolan Ryan, so I could put in Stan Musial and Hank Aaron, a choice driven by the fact that a position player that plays every day, plays defense, and bats four times a game is more impactful than someone who plays every five days. Then the official order of my Top-10 list was determined by multiplying the top-10 score by a number baseball-reference has called the Hall of Fame Monitor.
Yes, I am a nerd.
Our guest columnist, Matt’s NHL Top-10 stands proudly on its own and will go without a preface. Adam’s Top-10 Tennis list is still in its planning stages, so its parameters are not set in stone yet.
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