Who is the best basketball player of all time? The best quarterback? The best athlete?

These questions are some of the most heavily debated in sports. This year, ALLCITY set out to answer them.

Over the course of 10 days, we conducted polling of Diehard sports fans across the country on a number of different categories. The vote garnered 535 responses.

Every day this week, we’ll reveal top-five lists in the following categories:

• Monday: The best basketball player of all time
• Tuesday: The best quarterback to ever take the field
• Wednesday: The best overall athlete ever
• Thursday: The biggest, baddest villains in Arizona sports history
• Friday: The best uniforms ever worn by an Arizona team

We’ll also reveal how DNVR Diehards and staff voted on these categories and how they differ from the national results. For transparency, our methodology is listed at the end of this article.

So is the G.O.A.T. Debate officially settled? You be the judge.

Best basketball player of all time

The G.O.A.T. of basketball debate is seemingly settled…

Michael Jordan took the title in our vote by a pretty wide margin. He received 325 first-place votes while LeBron James earned just 67. At spots three and four, Kobe Bryant and Wilt Chamberlin were separated by just 0.2% of the point share, while Kareem Abdul-Jabbar rounded out the top five.

CHGO Diehards made up 37% of the entire voting pool, which could have swayed the result in Jordan’s favor. Did the voters get it right?

Methodology and quality controls

• Rankings used a 5–1 points system: five points for first place through one point for fifth
• place.
• Spelling, capitalization, obvious shorthand, and name variants were normalized before
• scoring.
• Team, color, era, alternate, and home/away uniform descriptions were consolidated into
• consistent market-specific labels.
• When the same final answer appeared more than once within one ranked question, it
• counted once at its highest placement; lower repeats were discarded.
• In a published uniform Top 5, a general team-only bucket was omitted when a specific
• uniform for that same team was also listed. If a general bucket stood alone, it displayed
• as the team name without “Unspecified.”
• Tied point totals share the same numerical rank. Display order then uses first-place
• votes, ballot mentions, and alphabetical order.
• ALLCITY point totals reconcile exactly to the sum of the five markets, with zero formula errors in the final workbook.