No. 7: Magic Johnson, PG, Los Angeles Lakers
Chief Accolades – 5x NBA Champion, 3x NBA Finals MVP, 3x NBA MVP, 12x NBA All-Star, 9x All-NBA First team
Stats – 13 Seasons, 19.5 PPG, 11.2 APG, 7.2 RPG, 1.9 SPG, 121 ORTG, 104 DRTG, 155.8 Career Win Shares, 77.4 VORP
This is one of the short blurbs where I’m going to spend more time defending myself on how low Magic is rather than remembering his greatness. Magic was great, real great but he just doesn’t have all-time numbers to stack up against the people ahead of him. His five rings are also a real kicker because his teams were stacked to beyond immeasurable levels.
Regardless of how good he was outside of scoring, it’s hard for me to put someone who didn’t average 20 points per game in my top 5. You compare Magic to a modern day Russell Westbrook and you can honestly make a case that the latter is having a better ‘prime’ numbers-wise. Magic, for his size, was also really poor on defense. His Defensive Rating isn’t terrible, but it’s not great and neither are his other defensive metrics like DWS (Defensive Win Shares) and DPM (Defensive Plus Minus).
Next: The Dream