The NBA All-Star Game MVPs Nobody Remembers

Ask a room of basketball fans to name All-Star Game MVPs and you will get the same handful every time: Jordan, Kobe, LeBron, Curry, maybe Shaq. Ask for twenty and the room goes quiet, which is odd, because the award has been handed out since 1951 and the list of winners is long, deep and full of players who had one enormous February afternoon and then disappeared back into their careers. There is a guard from the Cincinnati Royals on that list who most people have never heard of. There is a Buffalo Brave. There is the man who won the very first one, whose name means nothing to almost anybody now. This is a look at the far end of the list, and at why the obscure winners are more interesting than the famous ones.

Ed Macauley Won the First One

The award dates to 1951, and the first winner was Ed Macauley of the Boston Celtics, a centre and forward in an era when those were nearly the same job.

Macauley is not on the NBA 75th Anniversary Team. He is not on most casual all-time lists. He is, permanently and unarguably, the first player ever named Most Valuable Player of an NBA All-Star Game, and that is the kind of fact that separates people who know the league from people who follow it.

The following year, 1952, the award went to Paul Arizin of the Philadelphia Warriors, who did make the 75th Anniversary Team. Two winners in, and the list had already produced one name everybody keeps and one almost nobody does.

Adrian Smith, Cincinnati Royals, 1966

If there is a single answer that defines the obscure end of this list, it is Adrian Smith.

A guard for the Cincinnati Royals, Smith won the 1966 All-Star Game MVP. He is not on the 75th Anniversary Team. He is not a name that comes up in arguments about the 1960s, an era generally discussed through Russell, Chamberlain, Robertson and West.

And yet the record is the record. In a decade absolutely crowded with legends, the All-Star Game MVP for 1966 belongs to Adrian Smith, and no amount of subsequent fame moves it.

Randy Smith, Buffalo Braves, 1978

The other great deep cut, and a different flavour of one.

Randy Smith won the award in 1978 as a guard and forward for the Buffalo Braves, a franchise that no longer exists under that name. That is a double layer of obscurity: an unfamiliar player attached to a team most fans have never seen play.

Winners like Smith are why the full list is worth reading. They are the reminder that the NBA did not consist only of the teams and players who ended up in documentaries.

The 1959 Game Had Two

One of the neatest oddities on the list: the 1959 award was shared.

Elgin Baylor of the Minneapolis Lakers and Bob Pettit of the St. Louis Hawks were both named Most Valuable Player of that game. Co-winners are rare enough in any award that a shared one becomes a piece of trivia in itself.

For Pettit it was the middle of a remarkable run, which brings us to the record.

Editorial illustration: The NBA All-Star Game MVPs Nobody Remembers

Bob Pettit and Kobe Bryant, Four Each

The most All-Star Game MVP awards won by any player is four, and two men have done it.

Bob Pettit won in 1956, 1958, 1959 and 1962, all with the St. Louis Hawks. Kobe Bryant won in 2002, 2007, 2009 and 2011, all with the Los Angeles Lakers.

Forty-six years separate Pettit's first from Kobe's last, and the pairing is a good illustration of how these lists work: one of those names is quoted constantly, the other much less, and they hold exactly the same record.

Behind them, four players have three apiece: Oscar Robertson (1961, 1964, 1969), Michael Jordan (1988, 1996, 1998), Shaquille O'Neal (2000, 2004, 2009) and LeBron James (2006, 2008, 2018).

The 1970s Middle Class

Run through the 1970s winners and you get a run of names that sit in an interesting middle band, famous to anyone who knows the era and hazy to everyone else.

Willis Reed took it in 1970, Lenny Wilkens in 1971, Jerry West in 1972, Dave Cowens in 1973, Bob Lanier in 1974, Walt Frazier in 1975, Dave Bing in 1976, Julius Erving in 1977, Randy Smith in 1978 and David Thompson in 1979.

Reed, Wilkens, West, Cowens, Frazier, Bing and Erving are all on the 75th Anniversary Team. Lanier, Smith and Thompson are not, despite careers that were, by any ordinary standard, outstanding.

That split within a single decade is the clearest available picture of where the line of general fame actually falls, and how arbitrary it looks up close.

The Repeat Winners, and Why There Are So Few

Winning this award twice is much harder than it looks, and the list of players who managed it is short enough to read in full.

Two wins: Bob Cousy (1954, 1957), Julius Erving (1977, 1983), Isiah Thomas (1984, 1986), Karl Malone (1989, 1993), Magic Johnson (1990, 1992), Allen Iverson (2001, 2005), Kevin Durant (2012, 2019), Russell Westbrook (2015, 2016) and Stephen Curry (2022, 2025).

Three wins: Robertson, Jordan, O'Neal and James. Four: Pettit and Bryant.

That is the complete set of multiple winners across seventy-five years of the event, which is a strikingly thin list for an award handed out annually. The reason is structural. To win it you need to be an All-Star, which already restricts you to a couple of dozen players, and then you need to have the best individual game among them on one specific afternoon in a contest nobody is defending seriously. Being the best player in the building is not enough. You have to be the one who happened to get hot.

Notice too how many of the repeats come in pairs separated by years rather than back to back. Westbrook in 2015 and 2016 is the exception that proves it: consecutive wins are close to a fluke.

The Franchise Pattern

Sort the early winners by team and something jumps out that has nothing to do with individual greatness.

The Boston Celtics collected the award repeatedly in the 1950s through Macauley, Cousy twice and Sharman. The St. Louis Hawks collected it four times through Pettit alone. The Cincinnati Royals took it five times across Robertson, Lucas and Adrian Smith.

That clustering is what dominance looked like before free agency. A great team kept its players for a decade, sent three or four of them to the All-Star Game every year, and hoovered up the individual honours as a side effect. A modern equivalent is much harder to build, which is part of why the recent winners are spread so much more thinly across franchises.

Two Names, Same Record

It is worth sitting with the Pettit and Kobe pairing for a moment, because it is the cleanest demonstration of the whole problem with fame.

Both men hold the record. Both won four. Bryant's four came in an era of national television, global merchandising and permanent highlight circulation. Pettit's came in the 1950s and early 1960s, when a large share of the audience would have read about the game rather than watched it.

Ask a hundred fans who holds the record for most All-Star Game MVP awards and a great many will say Kobe Bryant, full stop. They are half right, and the missing half is the entire point of reading a full list rather than a highlights package.

Pettit, for what it is worth, is on the 75th Anniversary Team, was the first winner of the league's Most Valuable Player award, and is one of only four men named to all four NBA anniversary teams. He is not an obscure player by any reasonable measure. He is just not a famous one any more, which is a different thing entirely and happens to almost everybody eventually.

Why the Obscure Winners Are the Good Ones

There is a real principle underneath all this, and it applies well beyond one award.

Naming Michael Jordan as an All-Star Game MVP demonstrates nothing. He is the first name almost anyone produces for almost any basketball question, so the answer arrives without any knowledge attached to it. It is correct and it is free.

Naming Adrian Smith demonstrates something specific. You have either read the full list or you know the 1960s properly. There is no way to arrive at that answer by accident.

This is why recall games that only reward the obvious answer measure so little. Almost everyone can produce the top three names on any list. The interesting question is how far down you can go, and the answer separates people much more sharply than the top of the list ever does.

How to Actually Learn a List Like This

If you want to be the person in the room who can name fifteen of these rather than four, the method is duller than it sounds and it works.

Do not try to memorise the list. Sixty-odd names in arbitrary order is exactly the shape of information human memory is worst at holding, and you will lose it within a week.

Learn it by decade and by team instead. The 1950s are Boston and St. Louis, so Macauley, Cousy, Sharman and Pettit. The 1960s are Cincinnati and the giants, so Robertson, Lucas, Adrian Smith, Russell, Chamberlain. The 1970s are the New York and Philadelphia sides plus the expansion teams, which is where Reed, Frazier, Erving, Lanier, Bing and Randy Smith live. Grouped that way the list stops being sixty items and becomes six clusters of ten, which is a load a person can actually carry.

The second trick is to learn the odd ones first. Adrian Smith and Randy Smith are memorable precisely because they are surprising, and a surprising fact sticks with almost no effort. The famous winners will attach themselves later without you doing anything, because you already half know them.

The Trap in Building Lists Like This

A postscript from the other side of the screen, because we ran straight into it.

We built a quiz question around this award, and to keep our games playable we normally filter answers down to players a modern fan might reasonably recognise. Applied here, that filter left 46 of the 60-plus winners, and quietly discarded the rest.

Which meant a player who typed Dave Bing, a genuine 1976 winner and a member of the 75th Anniversary Team, was told he was wrong. So were people who named Adrian Smith, Randy Smith, Bob Lanier, Paul Arizin, Bill Sharman, Hal Greer, Jerry Lucas and David Thompson. Every one of them a real winner. Every one of them refused.

The fix was to keep the filter for choosing what the game asks of you, and abandon it entirely for what the game will accept. Name a winner from outside the list now and the game takes it, credits it and calls it a deep cut. A game that rejects a correct answer is not being difficult, it is being wrong, and there is no version of "hard but fair" that includes telling someone the truth is false.