Deep Bench Chronicles

Why rankings distort NBA history, erase context, and flatten the game’s lineage

This started as a loose editorial, but it quickly turned into something more structured.

As a recent user of X (I tend to be late to the party) I discovered a strangely authoritative world where accounts fire off Top 10s, GOAT debates, and “best PG of all time” takes the way a cowboy once drew his gun in the Old West. These pronouncements are delivered with confidence, often presented as obvious truths, yet built on surprisingly thin reasoning and, more importantly, on arguments that rarely survive even a minimal sense of historical context.

Before going any further, a clarification is in order.

Not all rankings are useless. The problem isn’t ranking itself, but the illusion that rankings can somehow settle history once and for all.

I’m not talking here about the playful lists people exchange among friends, the kind fueled by bad faith and humor. I’m talking about the serious ones, the definitive Top 10s that either spiral into endless self-contradiction or get dropped with a curt “no debate,” as if the discussion had already reached its conclusion.

As Nikola Jokić put it (I’ll use a quote from the Serbian, because it’s simply rare to see a player show that kind of intelligence and clarity, especially while still active):

“It would be stupid to think that basketball isn’t better today than it was 30 years ago. That would be like saying phones were better 30 years ago. Technology evolves, everything modernizes, and basketball evolves too.”

He’s right, of course. Basketball evolves, and in many measurable ways, players today are better than those who came before them. But evolution does not produce a hierarchy. It produces context.

Rankings create the illusion of precision where there is only preference

The rise of databases and tools like Basketball-Reference has created the impression that the debate can finally be settled, that with enough filters, splits, and sortable categories, history might reveal a clean, definitive order. In reality, what it has mostly done is make cherry-picking easier and more persuasive.

What looks like objectivity is often just selection. The “I lived it, it was better, you can’t understand” bias, versus “the player I’m watching right now is so much better than those scrubs from 50 years ago” mindset.

Even the numbers themselves are far less stable than they appear.

The NBA did not begin officially recording steals and blocks until the 1973–74 season, which alone makes any all-time comparison in those categories structurally incomplete. Entire defensive profiles from earlier eras have simply been lost to history. I’d be curious to know how many steals someone like Norm Van Lier, Jerry Sloan, or Walt Frazier had early in their careers. We might be in for a few surprises.

Even assists, often treated as one of the cleanest metrics, have never been immune to interpretation. The way they are recorded has shifted over time. For years, an assist could be invalidated if the scorer took too many dribbles (three, in practice, before finishing the play). Today, the definition is broader, often awarding the assist as long as the scoring intent is preserved.

What appears to be a stable statistical language is, in reality, a moving target.

Why should titles outweigh transformation? Why should longevity count more than peak? Why should visibility translate into historical weight? Rankings rarely answer these questions. They simply assume them, and present the result as neutral. The numbers look clean. The logic stays hidden.

The impulse to rank everything is, at its core, an internet neurosis.It reflects a purely incremental view of the sport, as if basketball history were nothing more than a sequence of software updates, patch after patch. A lazy way of reducing eighty years of play to something like a software changelog, where each generation simply “improves” on the previous one in a straight line.

Ranking players by “all-time efficiency” ends up resembling the logic of someone claiming Madden NFL 26 is inherently superior to Madden NFL 04 simply because the graphics are sharper. You miss what actually matters: impact, era, innovation.

A player running faster, jumping higher, or shooting from farther away does not automatically carry more historical weight. Judging the innovation of a Walkman by the storage capacity of an iPod misses the point entirely.

That is an engineer’s idea of history, not a historian’s.

Lineage, not replacement: one of the first things rankings erase is lineage.

There is no Shaq without Mikan, no David Robinson without Bill Russell, no Westbrook without Oscar Robertson, and no Nikola Jokić without the long, often forgotten line of big men who expanded what the position could be. Basketball evolves through transmission, not replacement.

The game itself is not stable

Ranking players across eras assumes that the sport itself has remained stable, when in reality it has changed constantly.

No three-point line. Hand-checking allowed. Carrying and traveling called tightly. Different spacing, different pace, different physical expectations.

The job of a point guard in 1972 is not the job of a point guard in 2026.

The best players in a given league are the ones who adapt best to what works and what’s allowed at that moment. What works today (flopping, step-backs, gather steps) simply wasn’t tolerated just a few years ago.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the way we talk about ball-handling.

Modern players (Kyrie Irving being the obvious example) are often presented as being light-years ahead of earlier generations in terms of handle. And visually, that seems undeniable. But what looks like superiority is often just permission.

A significant portion of today’s dribbling would simply not have been legal in earlier eras. The way players carry the ball, change direction, or manipulate the dribble would have been called every time. Go back to Bob Cousy, and you find a completely different set of constraints, where even placing the palm too far under the ball could be whistled. The ball itself, until the 1960s, was not even perfectly spherical, which alone changes the entire relationship between the hand and the ball. I highly recommend reading the incredible book The First Tip-Off by Charley Rosen, which dives into the unbelievable conditions of the NBA during its first 10 to 15 years.

To say that Cousy was a worse ball-handler than Kyrie Irving is to miss the point entirely. They were solving different problems under different rules, with different tools. What has changed is not just skill, but the framework that defines what skill looks like.

And you don’t even have to go all the way back to Cousy and the 1950s. I was recently watching a stretch of a Knicks–Pacers game from 1995, where John Starks got called for carrying just for getting his hand a little too far under the ball. You could make the same point about the step-back or the introduction of the gather step, but you get the idea.

Comparing them as if they operated in the same environment does not clarify history. It flattens it.

In that context, it becomes tempting to treat improvement as a linear process, where better athletes and cleaner efficiency automatically translate into greater historical importance. But performance is not the same as influence.

Players like George Mikan, Bill Russell, Wilt or Stephen Curry did not simply produce within the game; they altered its structure. That kind of impact cannot be captured by a ranking that treats all outputs as comparable.

Context is not optional

The same flattening happens when championships are treated as interchangeable currency.

We stack titles as if they all carried the same meaning, regardless of where and how they were won. But context does not erase achievement; it changes what that achievement represents.

Winning a title in Milwaukee does not involve the same conditions as winning one in Los Angeles. Leading Utah to two Finals against Michael Jordan’s Bulls cannot be evaluated in the same way as a championship run in New York. Market size, roster construction, competitive landscape, and organizational stability all shape outcomes in ways that resist simple comparison.

Rankings ignore these differences because they cannot easily quantify them.

What we remember feels more real than what we had to learn.

The players we have seen clearly, repeatedly, and recently tend to feel more tangible than those we only know through grainy footage or written accounts. In that sense, most rankings are less a reconstruction of history than a chronology of exposure, where visibility quietly substitutes for understanding.

This compression becomes even more problematic when considering the material conditions of different eras.

Playing ten years in the NBA in the 1950s or 60s likely demanded a level of endurance and adaptation that would be difficult to replicate today. Salaries, travel conditions, medical care, training, recovery, and long-term security were all fundamentally different. Even the end of the bench in today’s NBA benefits from resources early stars never had access to.

Yet rankings flatten that distance into a single column of seasons, totals, and averages, as if the underlying conditions were comparable.

That flattening becomes even more misleading when looking at career totals. Comparing raw accumulation across eras ignores the very different paths players took to reach (and stay in) the league.

For decades, spending several years in college was the norm, delaying the start of NBA careers and limiting total statistical output. Today, players can enter the league much earlier, sometimes straight out of high school (LeBron, Kobe, KG, Dwight, T-Mac…) or after a single college season (you name it), artificially inflating totals such as points, games played, or minutes accumulated.

Add to that the differences in salary, travel conditions, medical care, and long-term career sustainability. Playing ten years in the NBA of the 1950s or 60s likely demanded the equivalent of a much longer modern career.

Using raw totals as a primary measure of historical value is not just reductive: it borders on intellectual dishonesty.

At a certain point, the problem may lie in the question itself.

Comparing Stephen Curry to Magic Johnson is not so much difficult as it is misguided, in the same way that ranking Miles Davis and Mozart within the same framework misses what makes each of them meaningful. Basketball history is not a technical specification sheet, and it cannot be reduced to a single axis of comparison.

Lists do not really explain basketball; they reveal how we choose to simplify it. They offer clarity where there is complexity, order where there is overlap, and certainty where there should be interpretation. In doing so, they transform a rich, layered history into something that appears manageable, but only at the cost of its depth.

There is also a deeper, more persistent loop at work: an endless cycle of cherry-picking.

Without full visibility or complete archives, the idea of an absolute ranking never truly made sense to begin with. Today, because everything can be quantified, filtered, and displayed through tools like Basketball-Reference, it creates the illusion that the debate can finally be settled.

The list is not history. It is the anxiety of hierarchy disguised as knowledge.