The Best Sixth Men in NBA History

The best sixth men in NBA history turned a substitution into a weapon. The starting five gets the introductions, but championship rosters live or die on what comes off the bench in the second quarter, when the rotation thins and the score is still close. The NBA didn't formally honor that role until 1983, when the Sixth Man of the Year award went to Bobby Jones. Since then, only five Hall of Famers have won it, three players have won it twice, and two have won it three times.

What Makes a Great Sixth Man

The job has three pieces that don't fit easily together. You have to score immediately — coaches put you in when the offense has gone cold, and your minutes don't include a ramp-up. You have to accept the role — most NBA-level players believe they should be starting. You have to scale into the playoffs — a player who pads stats against tired second units and disappears in May isn't on this list. The award rewards regular-season production, but the all-time-great bench players were also Finals difference-makers. The list below uses both lenses: trophy hardware plus championship impact.

John Havlicek — The Proto Sixth Man

Before there was an award, there was Havlicek. Drafted seventh by the Celtics in 1962, he came off the bench during his early years in Boston and was widely considered the best reserve in the league — a 6'5" wing who could defend the perimeter and run for 48 minutes without fading. His career numbers were the kind of stat line most stars would kill for as a starter: 20.8 points, 6.3 rebounds, and 4.8 assists per game across 16 seasons, all with Boston. He was a 13-time All-Star, a five-time All-Defensive First Team selection, and held the all-time games-played record (1,270) at retirement. He won eight championships — only Bill Russell (11) and Sam Jones (10) have more — and was the 1974 Finals MVP. When the NBA renamed its Sixth Man trophy in 2022–23, it became the John Havlicek Trophy. That's as close as the league could come to admitting he had been the standard for the role from the very beginning.

Bobby Jones — The First Winner

Jones won the inaugural Sixth Man of the Year in 1982–83 as a 76er, then helped Philadelphia sweep the Lakers in the Finals. His regular-season line was modest by modern standards — roughly 9 points, 5 rebounds, an assist, and a block per game — but the award was always about more than scoring volume. Jones was a four-time All-Star and a member of eight consecutive NBA All-Defensive First Teams, a defensive résumé few players in any era can match. When he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2019, the case rested on what he gave the Doctor J–Moses Malone teams: efficient scoring, elite team defense, and the unselfish minutes that made the inaugural Sixth Man award make sense in the first place.

Kevin McHale — Two-Time Winner, Hall of Fame Power Forward

McHale's Sixth Man trophies came while he was already one of the best three players on his own team. He won the award in back-to-back years — 1983–84 and 1984–85 — becoming the first player ever to repeat. The first time, he averaged 18.4 points and 7.4 rebounds on .556 shooting. The second time, he pushed it to 19.8 points and 9.0 rebounds on .570 shooting. Those are All-Star starter numbers, delivered as the third option behind Larry Bird and Robert Parish. Boston won the title in 1984 and went back to the Finals in 1985. McHale was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1999 with career averages of 17.9 points and 7.3 rebounds across 971 games, three NBA championships (1981, 1984, 1986), and a low-post footwork toolkit that became the template every interior scorer studied for the next 30 years.

Bill Walton — MVP, Finals MVP, Sixth Man

Walton's 1985–86 season is the wildest entry on this list. He had already been Finals MVP (1977) and regular-season MVP (1978) with Portland. Then his feet betrayed him, and he missed most of the next six seasons. When the Celtics acquired him before 1985–86 as a backup big behind Parish and McHale, no one expected a full season. He played a career-high 80 games, averaged 7.6 points, 6.8 rebounds, 2.3 assists, and 1.2 blocks in 19 minutes on .562 shooting, won the 1986 Sixth Man of the Year, and helped Boston beat Houston in the Finals. He remains the only player in league history to win the MVP, Finals MVP, and Sixth Man Award — three completely different roles, three trophies.

Vinnie Johnson — The Microwave

Johnson never won the Sixth Man award, but he might be the most iconic bench scorer in NBA history. Nicknamed "the Microwave" by Danny Ainge for the speed at which he heated up, Johnson was the offensive accelerant for the Detroit Pistons' back-to-back champions in 1989 and 1990. His most famous moment came in Game 5 of the 1990 NBA Finals, when he hit a 14-foot jumper with 0.7 seconds left to clinch the title against Portland. The nickname survived him; "Microwave" is now permanent shorthand for any bench scorer who comes in cold and produces immediately.

Eddie Johnson — Pure Bench Buckets

Eddie Johnson won Sixth Man of the Year in 1988–89 as a Phoenix Sun, averaging 21.5 points per game off the bench in 70 games (with just seven starts), shooting 49.7% from the floor and 41.3% from three. That scoring number is one of the highest single-season totals ever for a designated reserve. Johnson played 17 NBA seasons and finished with 19,202 total points — at retirement, the 22nd-highest scoring total in league history. He never made an All-Star team, a quirk of his era's positional logjam, but the bench-scoring résumé is among the most prolific the league has ever produced.

Detlef Schrempf — Back-to-Back German Star

Schrempf won the award in back-to-back seasons with the Indiana Pacers in 1990–91 and 1991–92. The second campaign was a near-positionless effort: 17.3 points, 9.6 rebounds, and 3.9 assists per game off the bench. He was a 6'10" forward with shooting touch, passing vision, and the ability to defend both forward spots — a profile that translated awkwardly into the early-1990s positional grid but would fit perfectly in any modern lineup. The following year, moved into the starting lineup, he became the only player in the NBA to finish top-25 in scoring (19.1), rebounding (9.5), and assists (6.0) per game. He eventually made three All-Star teams and is one of the most decorated European players of his generation.

Toni Kukoč — The Bulls' Hidden Engine

Kukoč's 1995–96 Sixth Man of the Year season belongs to one of the most famous rosters ever — the 72–10 Bulls. With Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen handling the perimeter and Dennis Rodman locking down the glass, Kukoč gave the team a third primary creator off the bench: 13.1 points, 4.0 rebounds, and 3.5 assists per game in 26 minutes across 81 games. He's one of only five Hall of Famers ever to win the award (joining McHale, Jones, Walton, and Ginóbili) and the fourth player to win Sixth Man and an NBA title in the same season — a list that hasn't grown since. Kukoč won three championships with the Bulls (1996, 1997, 1998).

Editorial illustration: The Best Sixth Men in NBA History

Manu Ginóbili — Argentina's Hall of Famer

Ginóbili won four NBA championships with the San Antonio Spurs in 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2014, and is the only Spur ever to win Sixth Man of the Year — taking the 2007–08 award in a runaway vote (123 of 124 first-place votes) on a stat line of 19.5 points, 4.8 rebounds, and 4.5 assists in 31.1 minutes. He's one of only two players in basketball history (Bill Bradley being the other) to win an NBA championship, a EuroLeague title, and an Olympic gold medal, the last as 2004 FIBA Olympics MVP for Argentina. Across his 16-year career he averaged 13.3 points, 3.5 rebounds, and 3.8 assists on .447/.369/.827 splits, made two All-Star teams, and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2022. He defined the archetype — the dynamic two-way creator who chose the bench because his team won more games that way — and is the model every modern coach reaches for when designing a sixth-man role.

James Harden — Before the MVP

Harden's bench-scoring season is the easiest to forget because of everything that came after. In the lockout-shortened 2011–12 campaign, he averaged 16.8 points, 4.1 rebounds, and 3.7 assists in 31.4 minutes off the bench for the Thunder, won Sixth Man of the Year in a landslide (115 of 119 first-place votes), and helped that group reach the 2012 NBA Finals before losing to Miami in five. He was 22 years old. The Thunder traded him to Houston that October, where he became a 30-points-a-night superstar, won the 2018 MVP, and led the league in scoring three times. The Sixth Man trophy was the last preview of the player he was about to become.

Jamal Crawford — The Three-Time Champion of the Award

Crawford and Lou Williams share the record for most Sixth Man trophies with three each. Crawford won in 2009–10 with the Atlanta Hawks, 2013–14 with the Los Angeles Clippers, and 2015–16 with the Clippers again. The Hawks campaign saw him average 18 points off the bench. He played 20 NBA seasons across nine franchises and finished with career averages of 14.6 points, 3.4 assists, and 2.2 rebounds across 1,327 games. The handles were elite, the four-point play was a signature whenever he played, and the cultural footprint of his bench scoring helped redefine what teams looked for in their second unit through the entire 2010s.

Lou Williams — The All-Time Bench Points Leader

Lou Williams won Sixth Man of the Year three times — in 2014–15 with the Raptors, 2017–18 with the Clippers, and 2018–19 with the Clippers — tying Crawford for the all-time record. The case for Williams as the single greatest bench player goes beyond the trophies. He finished his career with 13,396 total points scored off the bench, an NBA record, in 1,123 games with only 122 starts. He was drafted out of high school by the Sixers with the 45th pick in 2005 and played 17 seasons across six franchises. His ability to draw fouls late in the shot clock and create his own shot at any level became one of the templates that defined modern bench scoring.

Jason Terry — The Jet, Champion Sixth Man

Terry won 2008–09 Sixth Man of the Year with the Mavericks, averaging 19.6 points, 3.4 assists, and 1.3 steals in 33.6 minutes on 36.6% three-point shooting across 63 of 74 games. Two years later, he was a central piece of Dallas's 2011 NBA championship run, averaging 18.0 points across the Finals against Miami and dropping 27 points in the series-clinching Game 6. Terry played 19 NBA seasons, made the 12th-most three-pointers in league history, and finished with career averages of 13.4 points and 3.8 assists across 1,410 games.

Dell Curry — The Sharpshooter

Curry won the 1993–94 Sixth Man of the Year with the Charlotte Hornets, playing all 82 games off the bench and setting career highs across the board, including 16.3 points per game. He was the only player in the entire 1990s to shoot better than 40% from three for seven consecutive seasons. When his career ended after 16 seasons and 1,083 games, he retired as the Charlotte franchise leader in games, points, field goals, and three-pointers made. Steph and Seth Curry both grew up watching him as the platonic ideal of a knockdown bench shooter, and the family lineage is now permanently tied to the role Dell defined first.

Andre Iguodala — Finals MVP From the Bench

Iguodala won 2015 NBA Finals MVP as the only player in league history to take home that award without starting every game of the series. He had been a starter in all 806 games of his career until joining Steve Kerr's Warriors in 2014, when he agreed to come off the bench. Down 2–1 to the Cavaliers in the 2015 Finals, Kerr moved Iguodala into the starting lineup for Games 4–6, unlocking the Death Lineup that closed the series. Iguodala averaged 16.3 points, 5.8 rebounds, and 4.0 assists while drawing the primary defensive assignment on LeBron James. He won four championships with Golden State. His Finals MVP is the cleanest example on this list of how a bench player can win a championship the rest of the rotation could not have won without him.

The Evolution of the Bench Scorer

The role has changed shape several times since Havlicek invented it. The 1970s and early 1980s treated the sixth man as an extension of the starting unit — a high-minutes wing who started on the bench. Havlicek, Jones, and early McHale were that template. The mid-1980s through the 1990s split the role into two profiles: instant-offense scorers like Vinnie Johnson, Eddie Johnson, and Dell Curry, and stretch frontcourt players like Schrempf and Walton. The 2000s added a third variant — the international playmaker, embodied by Ginóbili and Kukoč — who handled the ball as much as the starters did. The 2010s trended back toward isolation scoring with Harden, Crawford, and Williams turning the role into a 20-points-a-night guard assignment. The Iguodala arc is the modern outlier: a former starter who took a bench job by choice and won four titles. Coaches now openly talk about designing the bench around one starter-quality player — a framework that didn't exist in 1983.

Where the Award Stands Today

Forty-three years into the Sixth Man trophy, the math is striking: Crawford and Williams are the only three-time winners. McHale, Ricky Pierce, and Schrempf are the only two-time winners. Five Hall of Famers (McHale, Jones, Walton, Kukoč, Ginóbili) have ever won it. The trophy was renamed in 2022–23 in honor of John Havlicek, the player who defined the role decades before there was anything to win for doing it. The most recent recipient — Spurs guard-forward Keldon Johnson, who won the 2025–26 award — extends a lineage that began with Bobby Jones in 1983.

The bench scorer isn't a consolation role anymore. The best of them get paid like starters, finish games like starters, and are openly discussed as starter-equivalent contributors. The list above is what that case looks like with the receipts attached.

Closing illustration for The Best Sixth Men in NBA History