In October 2021 the NBA asked a panel to name the 75 greatest players in its history, and the panel came back with 76. A tie in the voting could not be broken, so rather than cut somebody the league simply widened the team by one. That small administrative shrug is a good introduction to the whole exercise, because a list like this is never really a ranking. It is a snapshot of what a large group of well-informed people agreed on at one moment, and the interesting parts are the seams: who was unanimous, who scraped in, and which entire eras the list quietly treats differently. Here is the full team, how it was assembled, and what the selections reveal.
How the Team Was Chosen
The selection process matters, because it explains most of the list's shape.
A blue-ribbon panel was assembled from current and former NBA players, coaches, general managers, team and league executives, WNBA legends, sportswriters and broadcasters. They were asked to pick the 75 greatest players in NBA history without regard to position, which is why the team is not balanced across the floor and was never meant to be.
Two rules shaped the outcome. Panelists did not rank their selections, so there is no official first or seventy-sixth. And current and former players were not allowed to vote for themselves, a small provision that says a lot about how many voters were also candidates.
The balloting was tabulated by the accounting firm Ernst & Young. The results were announced across TNT and ESPN over three nights, from October 19 to 21, 2021, as the league opened its 75th Anniversary Season.
Why There Are 76
The tie is the most quoted fact about the team and the most misunderstood.
The panel was asked for 75 names. The count of votes produced a dead heat at the bottom of the list, and rather than break it with a tiebreaker or a runoff, the league expanded the team to 76 and let both men in.
It is a decision that could only have gone one way. A list of the greatest players of all time is a celebration, not an audit, and there is no version of the story where cutting somebody on a coin toss ends well.
The League Never Said Who Tied
Here is the detail that keeps the tie interesting: the NBA announced that the vote produced a dead heat and expanded the team accordingly, and then never identified which two players it was.
The official announcement gives the fact and withholds the names. The team was released alphabetically, panelists did not rank their picks, and no vote totals were published, so there is no public way to work backwards to the answer.
That was almost certainly deliberate. Naming the tied pair would have marked two men publicly as the seventy-fifth and seventy-sixth best players in history, which is exactly the ranking the format was designed to avoid. Announcing 76 names in alphabetical order says something quite different: these are the great players, and the order they are printed in carries no meaning at all.
It is a small piece of restraint that made the list better, and it is the reason the tie is remembered as a charming quirk rather than as a slight against whoever finished last.
The Full 76, Alphabetically
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Ray Allen, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Carmelo Anthony, Nate Archibald, Paul Arizin, Charles Barkley, Rick Barry, Elgin Baylor, Dave Bing, Larry Bird, Kobe Bryant, Wilt Chamberlain, Bob Cousy, Dave Cowens, Billy Cunningham, Stephen Curry, Anthony Davis, Dave DeBusschere, Clyde Drexler, Tim Duncan, Kevin Durant, Julius Erving, Patrick Ewing, Walt Frazier, Kevin Garnett, George Gervin, Hal Greer, James Harden, John Havlicek, Elvin Hayes, Allen Iverson, LeBron James, Magic Johnson, Sam Jones, Michael Jordan, Jason Kidd, Kawhi Leonard, Damian Lillard, Jerry Lucas, Karl Malone, Moses Malone, Pete Maravich, Bob McAdoo, Kevin McHale, George Mikan, Reggie Miller, Earl Monroe, Steve Nash, Dirk Nowitzki, Hakeem Olajuwon, Shaquille O'Neal, Robert Parish, Chris Paul, Gary Payton, Bob Pettit, Paul Pierce, Scottie Pippen, Willis Reed, Oscar Robertson, David Robinson, Dennis Rodman, Bill Russell, Dolph Schayes, Bill Sharman, John Stockton, Isiah Thomas, Nate Thurmond, Wes Unseld, Dwyane Wade, Bill Walton, Jerry West, Russell Westbrook, Lenny Wilkens, Dominique Wilkins, James Worthy.
The Numbers Behind the Names
Aggregate the team and the totals are difficult to hold in your head.
Between them, the 76 players account for 159 NBA championships and 774 All-Star selections. They have won a combined 115 Most Valuable Player and Finals MVP awards. They scored more than 1.6 million points.
One note on how those are counted, because the convention changes the answer. All-Star selections and MVP awards here follow Basketball-Reference and combine NBA and ABA honours, which matters for the five men with ABA years on this list: Rick Barry, Billy Cunningham, Julius Erving, George Gervin and Moses Malone. Championships are counted as NBA titles only. Totals compiled a different way will differ, and most published versions of these figures do not say which way they chose.
Those figures are the argument for the exercise. Any individual selection is arguable. The collective weight is not.
The Eleven Active Players
Eleven men on the list were still playing when it was announced: Giannis Antetokounmpo, Carmelo Anthony, Stephen Curry, Anthony Davis, Kevin Durant, James Harden, LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard, Damian Lillard, Chris Paul and Russell Westbrook.
Including active players at all is a choice, and not every anniversary team has made it. It guarantees the list will age in public, because a career still in progress is being assessed halfway through. It also makes the team a document of its exact moment rather than a settled verdict, which is arguably more interesting.
Every Member of the 1996 Team Made It Again
One of the quietly striking facts: all 50 members of the NBA 50th Anniversary Team, named in 1996, were selected again in 2021.
Twenty-five years passed, an enormous amount of basketball was played, and not one of the original fifty was displaced. That is either a strong endorsement of the 1996 panel's judgement or evidence of how much anchoring shapes these exercises, and it is probably some of both.
The practical effect is that the 75th Anniversary Team is the 50th Anniversary Team plus 26 additions, most of whom played after 1996.
The Four Who Made All Four Teams
The NBA has named an anniversary team four times: at 25 years, 35, 50 and 75. The 25th Anniversary Team named 10 players and was the only one that excluded players who were active at the time. The 35th named 11.
Four men appear on all four: Bob Cousy, George Mikan, Bob Pettit and Bill Russell.
To be on the 25th Anniversary Team you had to be retired by 1971. To still be on the list in 2021 you had to survive fifty further years of scrutiny, several eras of basketball and a complete turnover of the voting panel. Those four did.
The First-Generation Representatives
The team reaches all the way back to the league's opening decade, and the specific selections are pointed.
Four members played in the first NBA All-Star Game in 1951: Paul Arizin, Bob Cousy, George Mikan and Dolph Schayes.
The list also includes the first winner of the Most Valuable Player award, Bob Pettit, for the 1955-56 season, and the first winner of the Finals MVP award, Jerry West, for the 1969 Finals.
Including the men who won the awards first is a neat piece of institutional memory. It means the team documents the league's origins as well as its peaks.
Six Countries
Six international players from six different countries and territories were selected: Giannis Antetokounmpo (Greece), Tim Duncan (U.S. Virgin Islands), Patrick Ewing (Jamaica), Steve Nash (Canada), Dirk Nowitzki (Germany) and Hakeem Olajuwon (Nigeria).
Six out of seventy-six is a small share, and it is a lagging indicator rather than a current one. The internationalisation of the NBA is recent enough that most of the players driving it have not yet accumulated the career length these lists reward. A 100th Anniversary Team will not look like this.
The Five Ambassadors
Five members of the team served as official ambassadors for the 75th Anniversary Season, chosen to represent different eras: Clyde Drexler, Magic Johnson, Dirk Nowitzki, Bob Pettit and Oscar Robertson.
The spread is the point. Pettit won the first MVP in 1956. Robertson defined the 1960s. Drexler carried the late 1980s and early 1990s. Magic is the 1980s. Nowitzki takes it into the 2010s. Five men covering roughly sixty years of basketball between them, which is a tidy way of saying the league is old enough to need ambassadors from more than one century.
Who Is Not on the List
A list of 76 out of every player who ever played is going to leave out extraordinary careers, and the absences are as informative as the selections.
Not on the team, among many others: Tracy McGrady, Vince Carter, Chris Webber, Alonzo Mourning, Ben Wallace, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili, Dwight Howard, Pau Gasol, Grant Hill, Bernard King, Connie Hawkins and Artis Gilmore.
Read that group and patterns appear. Several are players whose peaks were interrupted by injury, and a shortened prime is the single most reliable way to miss a list like this. Several were second or third options on great teams, where the credit is hard to split. Several played large parts of their careers in the ABA, whose statistics sit awkwardly beside NBA ones.
None of those are arguments that the panel got it wrong. They are descriptions of what the exercise is structurally bad at measuring: the career that was brilliant but brief, and the career that was excellent but shared.
What the Team Says About Position
Voters were told explicitly to select without regard to position, and the resulting team is nothing like a basketball roster.
That instruction is more consequential than it sounds. Positional quotas would have forced a certain number of centres and guards, which would have propped up eras when one position dominated and suppressed eras when it did not. Removing them lets the list follow the talent instead.
It also means the team cannot be read as a depth chart. There is no sensible way to pick a starting five from 76 names chosen on a criterion that ignored where any of them played, and the league never invited anyone to try.
What a List Like This Is Actually Measuring
The honest reading of any greatest-ever team is that it measures two things at once, and they are not the same.
The first is achievement: championships, awards, statistical peaks, longevity. That part is close to objective and it is why the aggregate totals are so large.
The second is memorability, which is much softer and does more work than people admit. A player who was central to a famous era, who played in big markets, who was on television constantly, is easier for a panel to recall and easier to justify. A player of equal quality on bad teams in small markets has to be actively remembered.
That is not a criticism of the panel so much as a description of how human recall works. Ask anyone to name great players and the answers arrive in a strikingly consistent order, weighted by fame at least as much as by merit. Any list produced by people is partly a list of who comes to mind first.
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- The Greatest NBA Centers in History
- The Greatest Point Guards in NBA History
- One-Team NBA Legends
The order names arrive in is a real thing, and it is worth playing with. Our daily Crowd Favourite game asks a question with dozens of correct answers and only rewards the ones everybody thinks of first.