Making the list

“If you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re probably on the menu.”

– Elizabeth Warren

When the NBA stepped into their 50th anniversary season, Commissioner David Stern announced a list of the “50 Greatest Players in NBA History”. Joining Stern at the lectern were NBA greats Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, George Mikan, and Julius Erving, all true monoliths of the game. With so many players having come through the league over the years, there weren’t many picks to criticize amongst the choice of the elite of the elite. Stern made sure to play up the league’s history, making the announcement from the same New York site as they had originally signed their charter. Here’s the cream of the crop, fifty years in:

The year was 1996.

A few observations of the impressive list above:

• There are a lot of LAL’s and BOS’s above.
• Many of the LAL’s and BOS’s are the only team those gents ever played for.
• If you don’t know who KCO, STL, MLH, SYR, CIN, SFW, MNL, NOJ, or several of the other teams are listed above, there’s some rich history in where those cities and superstars were.
• I thought Rick Barry, Elvin Hayes, and Shaquille O’Neal had made too many stops until… Moses Malone, was your suitcase ever fully unpacked?
• Oh, this one seems important. There are a lot of names from the last 25 years (and before) who are NOT on this list, notably, LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Chris Paul, Kobe Bryant, Dirk Nowitzki, James Harden, Vince Carter, Allen Iverson, Damian Lillard…
• Well, I’m not to 25 names yet, but you get the point.
• Oh, and one other nugget I gleaned from this list… There are no damned Nuggets on this list. The closest name to being a Denver Nugget is Danny’s pop Dolph Schayes.

Time certainly flew in the quarter-century the league has progressed, with Commissioner Adam Silver sharing plans for the NBA’s 75th anniversary, something that was only 75 days away… last week…

Today marks 75 days until the NBA’s 75th anniversary season. #NBA75 pic.twitter.com/PrXfIpW2tL

— NBA (@NBA) August 5, 2021

If the Denver Nuggets can’t get franchise luminaries such as Alex English, Dan Issel, or David Thompson onto the list of 50, they’ll probably not see them in the added list of 25. While a few names of these last 25 years may knock a couple of the fringes off the 50, odds are against  Denver may have a far better chance at having a piece of the careers of Iverson, Carmelo Anthony, or Dikembe Mutombo hang a “DEN” somewhere on that board. If they can’t, Denver fans will have to hope that the storied career of Nikola Jokic is worthy of landing him in that “100 at 100” list in 2046.