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The greatest individual season in NBA history is not the one you think it is.

The Net Wins formula measures how much a player’s statistical contributions converted into actual wins and losses, normalized against what their team needed on any given night. When you run every season in the database through it, ten performances separate themselves from everything else.

Three players account for seven of the ten slots. One player appears three times. One of the greatest centers in history produced two of the top four seasons before the age of 25 and has been largely forgotten by the modern conversation. And the only forward in the top ten got there on a team that also had Kevin McHale and Robert Parish.

Here are the ten greatest individual seasons ever played.

10. Larry Bird, 1985-86 Boston Celtics (67-15)

Net Wins: +11.32 | 2,115 pts | 805 reb | 557 ast | 51 blk | 166 stl | FG%: 49.6 | FT%: 89.6

The only forward in the top ten. Bird’s 1985-86 season produced +11.32 on a 67-win Celtics team that won the championship. He averaged 25.8 points, 9.8 rebounds, and 6.8 assists while shooting 49.6% from the field and 89.6% from the line.

Two things make this season remarkable. First, Bird was doing this surrounded by Hall of Famers. Kevin McHale and Robert Parish were both having excellent seasons on the same team. The formula isolates Bird’s individual contribution from that context and still finds +11.32. Second, his back had already started to cause problems the previous summer. He played through it. The 1985-86 season is Bird at something close to his physical ceiling before the injuries began their full accounting.

No other forward in the 295-player database has a single season above +11.00.

9. LeBron James, 2008-09 Cleveland Cavaliers (66-16)

Net Wins: +11.46 | 2,304 pts | 613 reb | 587 ast | 93 blk | 137 stl | FG%: 48.9 | FT%: 78.0

LeBron’s peak season by this formula came in Cleveland, not Miami or Los Angeles. The 2008-09 Cavaliers won 66 games and LeBron was 24 years old, in just his sixth NBA season, producing across every statistical category at a level the formula had not seen from a non-center.

The combination of 2,304 points, 613 rebounds, 587 assists, 93 blocks, and 137 steals in a single season is genuinely unusual. Most players who score at that volume are not also rebounding and distributing at that level. LeBron was doing all of it simultaneously on a team that needed all of it to win. The formula rewards breadth of contribution and there is no broader contributor in this top ten than LeBron in 2008-09.

He won the MVP award that season. The formula agrees it was deserved.

8. Shaquille O’Neal, 1999-00 Los Angeles Lakers (67-15)

Net Wins: +11.54 | 2,344 pts | 1,078 reb | 299 ast | 239 blk | 36 stl | FG%: 57.4 | FT%: 43.5

Shaq’s 1999-00 season produced 1,078 rebounds and 239 blocked shots alongside 2,344 points. Those are numbers that do not exist together in the modern game. He shot 57.4% from the field, which for a player handling the volume he handled is an extraordinary efficiency figure.

The number that should not be here is 43.5% from the free throw line. In a formula that counts missed free throws as negative actions, Shaq’s catastrophic free throw shooting is penalized. He produced +11.54 despite being one of the least efficient free throw shooters in the history of the sport. His raw physical dominance in that season was so complete that it overcame the drag of missing more than half his free throws.

He won the MVP, the Finals MVP, and the championship. The formula has him eighth all time for a single season and suggests that with functional free throw shooting he might have produced the greatest individual season in history.

7. Michael Jordan, 1991-92 Chicago Bulls (67-15)

Net Wins: +11.62 | 2,404 pts | 511 reb | 489 ast | 75 blk | 182 stl | FG%: 51.9 | FT%: 83.2

The first of Jordan’s three appearances in this top ten comes from his second championship season. The 1991-92 Bulls went 67-15 and Jordan produced +11.62. He shot 51.9% from the field while scoring 2,404 points and added 182 steals, a number that reflects how active and attentive he was at the defensive end.

The 1991-92 season is often overshadowed by the 72-win 1995-96 campaign in the Jordan conversation. The formula sees them differently. The 1995-96 season was Jordan’s peak. The 1991-92 season had a higher assist total (489 vs 352) and higher blocks (75 vs 42), reflecting a slightly more complete statistical profile even if the scoring and steals were lower. Two genuinely great seasons producing two genuinely great numbers.

6. Michael Jordan, 1996-97 Chicago Bulls (69-13)

Net Wins: +11.94 | 2,431 pts | 482 reb | 352 ast | 44 blk | 140 stl | FG%: 48.6 | FT%: 83.3

The 1996-97 Bulls won 69 games, one fewer than the previous year’s historic team. Jordan produced +11.94. This was the Flu Game Finals season, a year that many consider to be Jordan’s most complete performance given the physical obstacles, and the formula corroborates it as his second-best regular season.

Three Jordan seasons in the top ten, covering 1991-92, 1995-96, and 1996-97. The Bulls won the championship all three years. In each of those seasons the formula sees Jordan producing at a level that had never existed before in NBA history and has not been matched since by any guard.

5. Wilt Chamberlain, 1967-68 Philadelphia 76ers (62-20)

Net Wins: +12.50 | 2,142 pts | 1,952 reb | 702 ast | FG%: 59.5

The second Wilt entry has the most unusual statistical line in the top ten: 702 assists. Wilt Chamberlain, in 1967-68, led the NBA in assists. A 7-foot center. He had decided to become a playmaker and simply did it, averaging 8.6 assists per game while also pulling 1,952 rebounds and scoring 2,142 points.

No blocks or steals are recorded for this era. The formula credits what it can find and still produces +12.50, the fifth-best individual season in the database. With BLK and STL data from that season, the number would almost certainly be higher.

A season in which the best rebounder in basketball history decided to lead the league in assists is one of the stranger things that ever happened in professional basketball. The formula just sees an overwhelming contribution to winning and does not ask why.

4. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, 1971-72 Milwaukee Bucks (63-19)

Net Wins: +12.64 | 2,822 pts | 1,346 reb | 370 ast | FG%: 57.4

Kareem’s second-best season by this formula came in 1971-72 when he was 24 years old. 2,822 points is the highest single-season scoring total in this top ten. He shot 57.4% from the field at that volume. The Bucks went 63-19.

This was Kareem’s third season in the league. He had already been the MVP, already won a championship. He was getting better. The 1971-72 season is almost never discussed when people talk about the greatest individual seasons in NBA history. The formula puts it fourth all time.

No blocks or steals data is available for this era. Same note as Wilt: the actual performance was almost certainly better than what the formula can measure.

3. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, 1970-71 Milwaukee Bucks (66-16)

Net Wins: +13.01 | 2,596 pts | 1,311 reb | 272 ast | FG%: 57.7

The Bucks won the championship this year and Kareem was 23 years old. His second season in the NBA produced +13.01, the third-highest individual season in the database.

The article already written about Kareem on this Substack covers this season in detail. What is worth repeating here is the context: a 23-year-old, on a team in Milwaukee, in his second professional season, producing the third-highest individual season in the database. Only Wilt Chamberlain in 1966-67 and Michael Jordan in 1995-96 have ever exceeded it. The player who came closest to matching it the following year was Kareem himself.

That is the company Kareem was keeping at 23. The public has largely forgotten it.

2. Michael Jordan, 1995-96 Chicago Bulls (72-10)

Net Wins: +13.28 | 2,491 pts | 543 reb | 352 ast | 42 blk | 180 stl | FG%: 49.5 | FT%: 83.4

The 72-10 Bulls are the most famous team in NBA history and Jordan’s season within that team is the second-greatest individual performance the formula has ever recorded. He scored 2,491 points, shot 49.5% from the field, and added 180 steals. He was 32 years old in his second season back from the first retirement.

The formula puts Jordan second rather than first for a specific reason: Wilt’s 68.3% field goal percentage and 1,957 rebounds created a statistical footprint the formula has never seen from any other player in any other season. The Bulls were actually the better team by record. What Wilt did with his individual efficiency numbers in 1966-67 was simply outside anything the formula had encountered before or since.

Jordan won the MVP, the Finals MVP, and the championship. The formula agrees with all three.

1. Wilt Chamberlain, 1966-67 Philadelphia 76ers (68-13)

Net Wins: +13.69 | 1,956 pts | 1,957 reb | 630 ast | FG%: 68.3 | FT%: 44.1

The greatest individual season in NBA history belongs to Wilt Chamberlain in 1966-67, on a 68-win 76ers team that won the championship.

He shot 68.3% from the field. Not 68.3% for a game or a week. For an entire season. He pulled 1,957 rebounds. He averaged 24.1 points, 24.2 rebounds, and 7.7 assists per game. He missed more than half his free throws and still produced +13.69, the highest individual season in the database by a margin of 0.41 over Jordan’s 1995-96 season.

No blocks or steals data is available from this era. With those numbers the gap might be even larger.

The 76ers went 68-13. They had Hal Greer and Billy Cunningham and Chet Walker. They were a genuinely excellent team. The formula normalizes Wilt’s performance against that context and still finds a number that no other player in any season has come close to matching.

Wilt Chamberlain is not a player who comes up in the modern GOAT conversation with the frequency his numbers deserve. His career was complicated, his relationship with his own legacy was complicated, and he played in an era that is increasingly distant from the modern game. The formula does not care about any of that. It counts what happened. What happened in 1966-67 was the greatest individual season in the history of professional basketball.

What the Top Ten Tells Us

Seven of the ten seasons belong to three players: Wilt (2), Kareem (2), and Jordan (3). All seven of those seasons produced championships. The formula that measures individual contribution to winning is also, not coincidentally, a formula that identifies the players who contributed most to the teams that won the most.

The eighth, ninth, and tenth slots go to Shaq, LeBron, and Bird. All three also produced championships in the seasons around their peak, though not always in the exact peak year.

There is no season in the top ten from the modern three-point era outside of Jordan’s 1990s Bulls entries and LeBron’s 2008-09 Cavaliers. The formula is not biased against modern basketball. It simply sees that the players who dominated eras of more physical play, with more opportunities to rebound and control possession, produced larger individual contributions to team winning by this measure.

And then there is Wilt at 68.3% from the field, pulling 24.2 rebounds per game, in 1966-67.

That number has stood for nearly sixty years. The formula says it will stand for a while longer.

The full Net Wins database, 295 NBA players and every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.

Next: Shaquille O’Neal at #6. Subscribe to get it when it drops.

© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.

The full Net Wins database, Every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.

© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

netwins.substack.com

There is a version of Earvin Johnson that the highlights show you. The no-look passes. The fast break finishes. The smile that arrived before the play was even over. The showmanship was real and it was spectacular and it made the Showtime Lakers one of the most watched teams in the history of the sport.

There is another version that the highlights do not show. The version that arrived at the gym before everyone else. The version that, after spending his first years in the league as a player who could not reliably shoot from the perimeter, developed a mid-range game, then a hook shot, then a three-point shot he could pull up from the logo on a fast break. The version that understood, clearly and without sentimentality, that a smile is a tool and that winning requires more than personality.

The formula ranks him fifth all time. Combined net wins: +103.6. Thirteen seasons, 7.09 per year average. By career totals he sits behind Kareem, Duncan, LeBron, and Bird. By composite ranking he is fifth behind Kareem, Duncan, Bird, and LeBron.

Those numbers are excellent. They are probably not quite right.

What the Formula Sees

Regular season: +92.2 net wins Playoffs: +11.4 net wins Combined: +103.6 Avg/season: 7.09 Peak: +10.22 (1986-87, 65-win Lakers) Top-3 avg: 9.25 Seasons: 13

The career totals match Bird’s almost exactly. Bird at +106.1 combined, Magic at +103.6. Two and a half net wins over thirteen seasons separates them. The formula puts Bird ahead on the strength of a higher per-season average (7.21 vs 7.09) and a higher peak (11.32 vs 10.22).

What the formula cannot see is everything Magic did that did not show up in box scores. His read of a defense before the play developed. His ability to put teammates in positions where they could not fail. His presence in a locker room. These are real contributions to winning and the formula has no mechanism to count them.

The Rookie Year Nobody Remembers Correctly

Magic Johnson arrived in the NBA in the fall of 1979 alongside Larry Bird. Bird won Rookie of the Year. Magic won the championship.

In 1979-80, the three most important players in basketball produced the following Net Wins:

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: +9.68 Larry Bird: +7.82 Magic Johnson: +7.00

Kareem was the regular season MVP. His numbers in that season, 2,034 points, 886 rebounds, 371 assists, were among the best of his career. He was 32 years old and producing at a level most players never reach in their prime. The formula sees +9.68, the highest individual mark on the Lakers by a wide margin.

Magic was 20 years old. He posted +7.00 in his first professional season, which is an outstanding mark for a rookie and would be a career year for most players. He was not the best player on his team. He was not the best rookie in the league by this formula, which has Bird at +7.82 that year. He was a 20-year-old point guard in his first year learning a professional offense on a 60-win team.

Then Game 6 of the Finals happened. Kareem was injured. Magic started at center, scored 42 points, pulled 15 rebounds, dished 7 assists, and the Lakers won the championship. Magic was named Finals MVP.

It is one of the great individual performances in playoff history and it genuinely deserved the recognition it received. What it also did was establish a narrative that would follow both players for the rest of their careers: Magic was the face of the Lakers, and Kareem was the supporting cast. The formula, which counts every game in the regular season not just Game 6, disagrees.

The Development Nobody Talks About

When Magic entered the league he was not a shooter. His jump shot was mechanical and unreliable. Teams could sag off him and clog the paint. For a player whose entire game was built on reading defenses and creating for others, a defender who did not need to guard him on the perimeter was a serious problem.

He fixed it.

Over the course of the 1980s, Magic developed a reliable mid-range pull-up, then a hook shot he could use against bigger defenders, then a three-point shot that he would pull up on the fast break with the kind of confidence that only comes from having put in the work to earn it. By the late 1980s he was shooting efficiently from spots he could not have reached as a rookie.

Look at his scoring totals by season: 1,387 points in 1979-80, growing steadily to 1,909 in 1986-87, his peak year. That climb is not just volume. It is the expansion of his offensive repertoire year by year.

His peak, +10.22 in 1986-87, came in his eighth season. That is when the work accumulated into something rare. The 65-win Lakers that year were the best team of the decade and Magic was their best player at 27 years old, eight years into a career he had spent building himself into something better than he arrived as.

The Rivalry

The Bird-Magic rivalry is the most discussed in basketball history and the formula has already weighed in on it in the Bird article. Bird edges him by 2.5 combined net wins and a slightly higher per-season average. The composite ranking has Bird third and Magic fifth.

What the formula cannot measure is the cultural weight of what they did together. Two players, two cities, two complete opposites of style and background, arriving in the same league in the same year and spending a decade defining what professional basketball could be. They were the reason the NBA became what it became. The formula measures their basketball contributions. It cannot measure what they meant.

Magic knew Bird was the standard. Bird knew Magic was the standard. They said so, both of them, in interviews and in their own books. The rivalry was genuine. The respect underneath it was also genuine. Two players who needed each other to be as good as they were.

The Retirement

In November 1991, Magic Johnson announced he was HIV positive and was retiring from basketball.

He was 32 years old. His 1990-91 season had produced +8.01 net wins. He was still operating at an elite level.

The announcement was one of those moments where you remember exactly where you were when you heard it. November 7, 1991. A press conference in Inglewood. Magic Johnson at a podium, composed in a way that seemed impossible given what he was saying. It landed like a death announcement. HIV in 1991 was not a manageable condition the way it became later. It was a death sentence, slowly administered. The country stopped.

What followed was complicated in ways that sports coverage at the time was not fully equipped to handle. Several players around the league admitted, some publicly and some privately, that they were afraid to play against him. Afraid of a cut. Afraid of contact. The science did not support the fear but the fear was real and it was widespread, and it said something about how little the public understood about the disease and how much stigma had attached itself to it. Magic had to navigate all of that while also processing his own diagnosis.

The Showtime Lakers era had always carried a context that sportswriters largely left alone. Jerry Buss and the Hollywood parties. The lifestyle that came with being the face of a glamorous franchise in Los Angeles during the 1980s. Magic himself acknowledged in his autobiography that his personal life had been, by his own description, reckless. He never named a source of transmission. He did not need to. The implication hung over everything.

None of that is separate from the basketball. It is the whole picture. A player who arrived in the league as one of the most charismatic figures the sport had ever seen, who spent thirteen years building himself into something remarkable, who lived a life at the center of Hollywood’s orbit in ways that eventually caught up with him, and who walked to that podium in Inglewood and told the truth when he did not have to.

He returned briefly for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, lying on the gym floor between games alongside Bird, two men held together by compression and pride. He returned to the Lakers in 1995-96 for 32 games and produced +1.89, a shadow of what he had been but still functional.

The formula counts what it can find. It counts thirteen seasons and +103.6 net wins. It does not count what was taken away, or what it cost to lose it the way he did.

Fifth All Time

The ranking is fifth. By career totals that is accurate. By what he actually meant to the game, to his teammates, to the league’s survival during a period when it nearly collapsed, the number falls short.

The formula rewards what it can measure: points, rebounds, assists, steals, missed shots, turnovers, fouls. All of it normalized against what his team needed to win on a given night. It is a good measure of basketball contribution. It is not a complete measure of a player who organized an offense the way Magic did, who made every player around him better in ways that do not show up in any column.

Fifth all time is where the formula lands. It is an honest number. It is probably not the whole story.

The smile was real. So was everything underneath it.

The full Net Wins database, 295 NBA players and every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.

Next: Shaquille O’Neal at #6. Subscribe to get it when it drops.

© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.

The full Net Wins database, Every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.

© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

netwins.substack.com

The question of which USA Olympic basketball team was the best is usually answered by reputation. The 1992 Dream Team wins by default because it was the first, because it had Jordan and Magic and Bird on the same bench, because the world had never seen anything like it.

But reputation is not a number. So I ran each roster through the Net Wins formula, using each player’s performance from the NBA season immediately before the Olympics. The 1992 team gets their 1990-91 numbers. The 2004 team gets their 2003-04 numbers. The idea is to capture each player at the specific moment they represented the country, not their career peak or their legacy.

Net Wins is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The results are not what you would expect.

The Method

Net Wins measures how much a player’s statistical contributions converted into actual wins and losses, normalized against what their team was doing that season. A positive number means the player was a net contributor to winning. A negative number means the opposite.

For each Olympic roster, I summed the individual Net Wins of every player in the database from the qualifying season, then calculated a team average. I also include each team’s average winning margin in actual Olympic competition, which is the real-world test of the formula’s predictions.

One methodological note on 1992: Magic Johnson had retired in November 1991 after his HIV diagnosis and played only five games that season. I used his 1990-91 season (+8.01 net wins), which is the standard approach for capturing his contribution. He was the same player in the summer of 1992 that he had been in the spring of 1991.

The Roster Spot Nobody Talks About

Before getting to the numbers, there is one piece of 1992 history worth addressing.

Isiah Thomas was not on the Dream Team. Clyde Drexler was chosen over him for the final professional roster spot on May 12, 1992. Christian Laettner of Duke was added as the token collegiate player.

Thomas in 1990-91 posted +3.36 net wins, a solid season on a 50-win Pistons team. Drexler that same year posted +7.49. By the formula, Drexler was the right choice on merit. But the basketball world at the time knew, and subsequent reporting has confirmed, that Jordan and Pippen and others made clear they would not be comfortable playing with Thomas. The Bad Boys era was recent, the rivalry was real, and Thomas paid for it.

Whether he deserved to be there is a separate conversation. What we do know is that Laettner, who had zero NBA games to his name, was chosen over a two-time champion and future Hall of Famer for reasons that had nothing to do with basketball.

And here is what nobody mentions: the practice sessions from that summer in Monte Carlo were frequently described by coaches and players who witnessed them as some of the best basketball ever played. The Dream Team scrimmaging against itself. Jordan and Magic and Bird and Pippen and Barkley at full speed against each other with nothing to prove to anyone but themselves. Those sessions were never filmed for public broadcast. The world never got to see them. That remains one of the genuine losses in basketball history.

1992 Barcelona, Gold Medal

Season used: 1990-91 | Avg winning margin: +43.8 points

Player

Net Wins

Michael Jordan +9.38

Magic Johnson +8.01

David Robinson +7.54

Clyde Drexler +7.49

Scottie Pippen +6.90

Karl Malone +6.38

John Stockton +6.23

Larry Bird +4.92

Chris Mullin +2.95

Charles Barkley +1.92

Patrick Ewing +0.55

Christian Laettner college

Team total (11 NBA players): +62.3 | Team average: +5.66

Chuck Daly never called a single timeout during the entire tournament. The team averaged 117.3 points per game and won every game by at least 30 points. Daly described traveling with them as “like Elvis and the Beatles put together.” Opposing players asked for autographs before tip-off. Other Olympic athletes mobbed the hotel lobby just to be near them. There was nothing in sports history to compare it to and there has been nothing since.

One detail that surprises people: Charles Barkley was the team’s leading scorer at 18.0 points per game, ahead of Jordan, Magic, and everyone else. The formula had him at +1.92 the prior season, the second-lowest mark on the NBA roster. What it cannot measure is Barkley completely unleashed, playing with no defensive assignment pressure, no coaching system constraints, and twelve Hall of Famers around him making every possession easier. He was the most fun player on the most fun team in sports history and he played like it every night.

The formula sees a roster where eight of eleven players produced more than five net wins the prior season. Bird at +4.92 was already diminished by injury. Barkley at +1.92 was in a down year. Ewing at +0.55 was the weakest link by a significant margin. But the top of the roster was historically concentrated talent.

1996 Atlanta, Gold Medal

Season used: 1995-96 | Avg winning margin: +31.8 points

Player

Net Wins

Scottie Pippen +10.63

Shaquille O’Neal +9.64

David Robinson +7.60

Gary Payton +7.22

Karl Malone +6.47

Anfernee Hardaway +6.45

John Stockton +6.10

Hakeem Olajuwon +3.72

Grant Hill +2.94

Reggie Miller +2.91

Charles Barkley +1.66

Mitch Richmond -0.49

Team total (12 players): +64.9 | Team average: +5.40

Here is where the historical consensus gets complicated.

The 1996 team had a higher team total than 1992 across 12 fully active NBA players. Seven of its twelve posted more than five net wins, compared to five of eleven for 1992. Five players carried over directly from 1992, bringing institutional knowledge of how to play together. Pippen without Jordan’s shadow was the best individual performer at +10.63. Shaq at 24 was approaching the dominance that would define the next decade.

The winning margin dropped from 43.8 to 31.8 points. The common interpretation is that 1996 was a weaker team. The more accurate interpretation is that the rest of the world had watched 1992 on television and spent four years improving. The gap closed not because the Americans were weaker but because the competition had been studying.

A hypothetical 1992 vs 1996 matchup is genuinely interesting. The 1996 team’s depth and collective average would make it competitive with anyone. Most basketball observers would take 1992 on the strength of Jordan alone, and they would probably be right. But the formula says the margin would be smaller than most people expect.

2000 Sydney, Gold Medal

Season used: 1999-00 | Avg winning margin: +9.7 points

Player

Net Wins

Jason Kidd +5.45

Kevin Garnett +5.42

Alonzo Mourning +4.20

Steve Smith +3.92

Antonio McDyess +3.52

Allan Houston +3.25

Gary Payton +2.57

Vince Carter +1.42

Vin Baker +1.36

Tim Hardaway +0.57

Ray Allen +0.12

Shareef Abdur-Rahim -4.27

Team total (12 players): +27.5 | Team average: +2.29

The numbers explain the margins. A 9.7-point average winning margin was the smallest of any gold medal team and included two genuinely close games. The formula predicted a good but not dominant team, and the results confirmed it. Vince Carter’s dunk over Frederic Weis was the defining moment of the tournament, which tells you something about how much the Americans needed individual brilliance to carry games that the 1992 or 1996 teams would have won by 30.

2004 Athens, Bronze Medal

Season used: 2003-04 | Record: 5-3

Player

Net Wins

Tim Duncan +7.38

Richard Jefferson +2.20

Lamar Odom +1.01

Dwyane Wade +0.57

Stephon Marbury +0.47

Carlos Boozer -0.17

Carmelo Anthony -0.25

Shawn Marion -1.05

Amare Stoudemire -1.92

LeBron James -2.04

Allen Iverson -3.59

Emeka Okafor n/a (rookie, college 2003-04)

Team total (11 NBA players): +2.6 | Team average: +0.24

A team average of +0.30 is essentially neutral. Duncan was an island at +7.38. LeBron at 19 in his first NBA season was -2.04. Five of eleven players were negative.

Larry Brown installed Duncan and Allen Iverson as co-captains of the team. That framing is worth sitting with for a moment. Duncan at +7.38 was the most valuable player on the roster by a wide margin. Iverson at -3.59 was the furthest below zero.

A word of honesty about that Iverson number: this formula has a known relationship with his style of play. Iverson was one of the most electrifying players in the history of the sport. He also led the league in missed shots most years, drew enormous defensive attention that created opportunities for teammates the formula cannot fully credit him for, and played his best basketball in a specific offensive system built around his isolation creation. The Net Wins formula sees his high shot volume and turnover rate without seeing what his presence unlocked for others. His true value to a team was always more complex than the raw numbers suggest.

That said, even accounting for the formula’s blind spots on Iverson, a team average of +0.30 is hard to explain away. Five of eleven players were negative. The roster was young, inexperienced in international play, and assembled on short notice without the kind of continuity the 1996 team had built over years. The formula would have predicted the bronze medal before the plane left for Athens. It did not predict the specific path of three losses, but it understood the aggregate talent level clearly enough.

2008 Beijing, Gold Medal

Season used: 2007-08 | Avg winning margin: +27.9 points

Player

Net Wins

Kobe Bryant +6.93

Chris Paul +6.46

Dwight Howard +5.65

Carlos Boozer +5.09

Deron Williams +4.91

Tayshaun Prince +3.85

LeBron James +2.95

Carmelo Anthony +2.86

Jason Kidd +2.77

Chris Bosh +1.42

Michael Redd -3.11

Dwyane Wade -7.02

Team total (12 players): +32.8 | Team average: +2.73

Wade at -7.02 on a season disrupted by injury and Redd at -3.11 dragged the average down considerably. The real core was Kobe, CP3, and Howard. The 27.9-point winning margin reflects a well-prepared team facing a field that still wasn’t at NBA level, not historical dominance. The Redeem Team narrative was real. The formula saw something more modest.

2012 London, Gold Medal

Season used: 2011-12 (lockout-shortened) | Avg winning margin: +32.1 points

Player

Net Wins

Kevin Durant +6.07

LeBron James +5.72

Russell Westbrook +4.94

James Harden +3.69

Kobe Bryant +3.05

Chris Paul +2.85

Tyson Chandler +2.35

Andre Iguodala +1.80

Carmelo Anthony +0.80

Kevin Love -0.04

Anthony Davis -0.47

Deron Williams -1.40

Team total (12 players): +29.3 | Team average: +2.45

These numbers come from a lockout-shortened 66-game season, which compresses totals. Anthony Davis at -0.47 was a 19-year-old rookie in his first NBA season. Durant and LeBron at the top of the roster were both at or near their primes. The winning margin of 32.1 points and the formula’s average of +2.45 track each other closely. The gold medal game against Spain went to seven lead changes and required Durant’s 30 points to close.

2016 Rio, Gold Medal

Season used: 2015-16 | Avg winning margin: approx +20 points

Player

Net Wins

Klay Thompson +8.80

Draymond Green +8.43

Kevin Durant +5.71

Kyle Lowry +5.37

Kyrie Irving +4.76

Harrison Barnes +4.73

DeMar DeRozan +4.58

DeAndre Jordan +4.23

Paul George +1.52

Jimmy Butler +1.23

DeMarcus Cousins -0.68

Carmelo Anthony -2.11

Team total (12 players): +46.6 | Team average: +3.88

The 2016 team is the most underrated roster in this analysis. Thompson and Green came off the 73-win Warriors season at +8.80 and +8.43 respectively. The depth from positions three through eight is better than any other team in the database. The team average of +3.88 is second only to 1992 and 1996. And yet because the roster didn’t have a single narrative player, because it was built on Warriors depth and complementary excellence rather than one dominant star, it gets undervalued in the historical conversation.

The lower winning margin reflects how much better the world had become by 2016. Against 1992 competition, this team might have won by 35 points a game.

2020 Tokyo, Gold Medal (held 2021)

Season used: 2020-21 | Record: 5-1

Player

Net Wins

Devin Booker +4.77

Kevin Durant +3.10

Khris Middleton +3.08

Bam Adebayo +2.88

Jrue Holiday +2.68

Damian Lillard +2.61

Draymond Green +1.45

Jayson Tatum +0.63

Keldon Johnson +0.17

Zach LaVine +0.06

JaVale McGee -0.36

Jerami Grant -2.77

Team total (12 players): +18.3 | Team average: +1.53

The formula, with an average of +1.53, would have flagged this as a team where a single bad game was possible. France caught them in the group stage. Jrue Holiday’s defensive brilliance in the semifinal rematch saved the tournament. The formula can measure what he produced statistically in the regular season. It cannot fully account for what he did to Evan Fournier’s shooting percentage in a single elimination game in Tokyo.

2024 Paris, Gold Medal

Season used: 2023-24 | Avg winning margin: approx +16 points

Player

Net Wins

Jayson Tatum +7.92

Anthony Edwards +5.29

Derrick White +4.85

Joel Embiid +4.17

Anthony Davis +4.17

Tyrese Haliburton +4.13

LeBron James +4.00

Kevin Durant +3.82

Jrue Holiday +3.75

Bam Adebayo +3.30

Devin Booker +2.57

Stephen Curry +2.55

Team total (12 players): +50.5 | Team average: +4.21

The 2024 team has the third-highest average of any roster in this analysis and is the deepest gold medal team outside of 1992 and 1996. Nobody was a drag on the average. Twelve players, all positive.

One number worth sitting with: Jaylen Brown posted +7.00 net wins in 2023-24, the same season he won Finals MVP. He was left off this roster entirely. Had he replaced any of the lower contributors, the team average climbs to roughly +4.58. The three Celtics teammates on this roster, Tatum, Holiday, and White, all made the team. The one who was named the best player in the NBA Finals did not.

The defining moment of the tournament had nothing to do with the formula. France in the gold medal game, on home turf in Paris, with the crowd louder than anything the Americans had heard all summer. Stephen Curry, who had been quiet for stretches of the tournament, caught fire in the second half and buried three after three in front of a stunned home crowd. It was one of the great individual performances in Olympic basketball history and it happened on the biggest possible stage against the most hostile possible crowd.

Tatum at +7.92 was the highest individual mark on the roster coming in. He played almost no meaningful minutes in the knockout rounds. He arrived in Paris as a fresh NBA champion, having just led the Boston Celtics to the 2024 title weeks earlier alongside Jaylen Brown, who was controversially left off the Olympic roster entirely despite being the NBA Finals MVP. Steve Kerr, whose Golden State Warriors had defeated those same Celtics in the 2022 Finals, effectively benched Tatum as the tournament progressed. Whether that history played any role in the decision, or whether it was purely tactical, is a question only Kerr can answer. What the formula can say is that the player who entered Paris with the best individual numbers on the roster spent the gold medal game on the bench while his team won without him. That tension went largely unspoken during the celebration but it was there.

The 1992 team wins. But 1996 is closer than its reputation suggests, with a higher team total and comparable depth. The 2004 bronze was foreseeable. The 2016 team deserves more credit than it gets. And the winning margins tell a story of their own: as the Americans declined in the early 2000s, the margins narrowed. As they rebuilt from 2008 onward, the margins recovered. But they never returned to 1992 levels. The world watched Barcelona, went home, and got better.

The scrimmages in Monte Carlo that summer, the Dream Team against itself, were reportedly some of the best basketball ever played. No cameras. No broadcast. Twelve of the greatest players who ever lived competing at full speed with nobody watching.

The formula counts everything it can find. It cannot count what was never recorded.

The full Net Wins database, 295 NBA players and every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.

Next: Shaquille O’Neal at #6. Subscribe to get it when it drops.

© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.

The full Net Wins database, Every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.

© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

netwins.substack.com

Before the NBA was what it is today, it was in serious trouble.

In 1979, the league was broadcasting its own Finals on tape delay. Attendance was declining. The drug problems that plagued several players were public and widely covered. But the deeper issue, the one that league executives talked about privately and journalists occasionally said out loud, was that a significant portion of white America had decided the NBA was not for them. The league was roughly 75% Black by the late 1970s, and the audience that advertisers most wanted to reach had drifted away. CBS, which broadcast the Finals, did not believe the games could hold primetime ratings. The tape delay was not just a scheduling decision. It was a statement about who they thought was watching.

Bird changed that calculus. Not through any fault of his own, but because his presence gave a segment of the audience an excuse to come back. That is an uncomfortable thing to say plainly, but it is what happened, and the league knew it. Red Auerbach knew it. The sponsors knew it. Bird himself knew it, and he was characteristically blunt about it in interviews over the years.

What followed was one of the great sporting rivalries in American history, Bird and Magic, Boston and Los Angeles, a decade of basketball that pulled the whole country back into the game. The rivalry saved the league. The quality of the basketball underneath it was something else entirely.

The Numbers

Regular season: +93.7 net wins Playoffs: +12.4 net wins Combined: +106.1 Seasons: 13 Avg/season: 7.21 Peak: +11.32 (1985-86, Boston Celtics, 67-15)

That peak puts him in rare company. The only players in the database with higher single-season marks are Wilt Chamberlain, Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaquille O’Neal, and LeBron James. His 1985-86 season on the 67-win Celtics is the sixth-highest individual season in the entire 268-player database.

His top-three season average of 10.32 is the fifth-best mark in the database, behind Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem, and LeBron James.

The formula’s position on Bird is straightforward. He was the fourth-best player in NBA history by combined net wins, behind only Kareem, Duncan, and LeBron James, and he did it in 13 seasons before his body gave out. The composite ranking, which weights per-season average and peak alongside career totals, puts him third overall. By either measure, the case is the same.

What People Get Wrong About Him

The conversation about Bird tends to get stuck in a familiar place. He was slow. He couldn’t jump. How good could he really have been against today’s athletes?

This framing makes a category error. It confuses athleticism with one specific expression of athleticism, the kind you can measure with a stopwatch or a vertical leap test, and ignores everything else.

Bird was 6’9” and listed at 220 pounds but played heavier. He was uncommonly strong for a forward, strong enough to hold position against centers, strong enough that opponents could not move him off his spots. He had enormous hands and the kind of hand-eye coordination that allowed him to make passes most players cannot physically execute regardless of their speed. He was a career 88% free throw shooter. His footwork was so precise that he could create space against faster defenders in ways that pure speed cannot replicate.

What he had, more than anything, was anticipation. He processed the game at a different speed than the people guarding him. He knew where the ball was going before it got there. He saw the help defense rotating before it arrived. He made the pass into the gap that was about to open rather than the gap that currently existed.

Every night watching him play felt like watching someone solve the game in real time. Another impossible pass. Another shot from an angle nobody tried. Another read of a defense that didn’t know it had been read yet.

The formula does not measure any of this directly. It measures what his contributions produced in wins and losses. The numbers it found suggest that whatever Bird was doing, it worked at a level only a handful of players in the history of the sport have matched.

The Blue Collar Legend

The story people tell about Bird is inseparable from where he came from. French Lick, Indiana. A town of 2,000 people. A father who struggled, a family that had very little. Bird worked summers in sanitation, learned the game alone in a gym, became one of the greatest players who ever lived through sheer accumulation of work.

The injury timeline tells the story of who he was as much as anything he did on a basketball court.

In the summer of 1985, Bird was shoveling crushed stone to build a driveway for his mother in French Lick, Indiana. He was 28 years old, reigning MVP, the best player on one of the best teams in basketball. He could have hired someone. He did not. The result was the back injury that started everything, spinal damage that produced chronic pain he played through for the rest of his career.

At some point in the mid-1980s, Dell Curry caught him with an accidental elbow to the face that fractured his eye socket. Bird briefly saw two baskets. He stayed in the game.

Before the 1988-89 season, on a pre-season trip to Spain, severe bone spurs and Achilles problems became impossible to ignore. He underwent surgery on both heels. He played six games that season. The formula records 0.06 net wins for 1988-89. That is not a bad season. That is almost no season at all.

By the early 1990s his back had developed into a severely herniated disc. He rode an exercise bike for up to an hour before games just to get his body functional enough to play. He had spinal fusion surgery before the 1991-92 season and played 45 games. He retired the following summer.

The Dream Team footage from the 1992 Barcelona Olympics shows him lying flat on the floor between games, the only position that gave him any relief. He was 35 years old, one of the greatest players who ever lived, lying on a gymnasium floor in Spain because his back would not let him sit in a chair.

He played 13 seasons. Given what his body was carrying for most of them, that number deserves more respect than it usually gets. He missed the start of the 1988 season and was never quite the same player afterward.

Look at the season log and you can see exactly where it happened.

His first nine full seasons average 8.34 net wins per year. The peak is 11.32. Then 1988-89 produces 0.06, a season almost entirely lost to injury after just six games. Then partial returns, good but diminished seasons, and retirement at 35 with two surgically repaired Achilles tendons and a back that had been in trouble for seven years.

The formula cannot measure what a healthy Bird career would have looked like. It can only count what happened. What happened was good enough to make him the third-best player in NBA history by this measure. A full career, without the mowing and the construction work and the accumulated damage of playing through things that should have kept him out, might have changed the numbers at the top of the list.

The Point Forward Nobody Called a Point Forward

LeBron James is widely credited with inventing or perfecting the point forward, the concept of a player the size of a power forward who handles, creates, and orchestrates like a guard.

Bird was doing this in 1982.

His assist totals tell the story. In his peak seasons, he posted between 451 and 566 assists per year, numbers that belonged to point guards, while also averaging double-digit rebounds and 24-29 points. In 1985-86, he led a team of Hall of Famers, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish among them, and was their primary playmaker while also being their primary scorer.

His help defense is the other underrated dimension. Bird was not a lockdown individual defender. He was not asked to be. What he was, on teams that needed everyone to be engaged on that end, was one of the best help defenders in the league. He read passing lanes, anticipated cuts, and finished plays defensively that most forwards at his size never got to because they never saw them coming. He averaged 1.8 steals per game for his career, a number that reflects the anticipation as much as the athleticism.

The formula credits this. Steals and blocks are in the positive action column. Every steal Bird generated was a possession the opposing team did not get. At his peak he was producing those at a rate that put him among the league leaders at his position.

The Rival

You cannot write about Bird without writing about Magic, and the formula has something to say about that comparison too.

Magic Johnson is #5 in the database at +103.6 combined net wins. Bird is #3 at +106.1. They are 2.5 wins apart over careers of almost exactly the same length, thirteen seasons each at their respective franchises.

What separates them in the formula is the peak. Bird’s best single season is 11.32. Magic’s best is 10.22. Bird’s top-three average is 10.32. Magic’s is 9.25. The formula sees two players of nearly identical career value, with Bird having the higher ceiling.

The rivalry that saved the league was, by the numbers, almost exactly even. The formula edges Bird. Whether you agree or not is one of the better debates in basketball history, and it was a debate worth having in front of the whole country for most of a decade.

What 13 Seasons Can Look Like

The argument against Bird usually comes down to longevity. Jordan played 15 seasons. Kareem played 20. Duncan played 19. How can Bird rank third with only 13?

The answer is in the per-season numbers.

His 7.21 average net wins per regular season is the highest of any player in the top ten. Kareem averages 6.72 per season. Jordan averages 5.30. Magic averages 7.09. Bird at 7.21 produced more per season than any of them.

Thirteen seasons of that quality is enough. The formula does not penalize players for careers that ended early because of injury rather than decline. It counts what was there. What was there, for thirteen years from French Lick, Indiana, was the third-best sustained individual performance in the history of the sport.

He knew it was ending. He played through two Achilles surgeries, a back that had been failing for years, and a body that had been asked to do more than it was built to give. He retired in 1992 at 35, stood at the podium, and said he had given everything he had.

The formula agrees.

The full Net Wins database, 268 NBA players and every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.

Next: Magic Johnson at #5. Subscribe to get it when it drops.

© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.

The full Net Wins database, Every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.

© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

netwins.substack.com

Every ranking system that tries to evaluate Julius Erving eventually hits the same wall.

The NBA numbers are excellent but incomplete. He played 11 NBA seasons with the Philadelphia 76ers and produced 48.8 regular season Net Wins — a career you’d expect to land someone in the top 15 all time. But before the NBA there were five ABA seasons with the Virginia Squires and New York Nets, and those five seasons are where the argument actually lives.

The Net Wins formula now includes ABA data for every player who competed in the league, discounted by a user-adjustable weight to account for the difference in competitive level. The default is 90 cents on the dollar every ABA Net Win counts as 0.9 NBA Net Wins.

At that 90% discount, Erving’s combined total is 69.6. He ranks #21 all time.

Change the discount slider to 100% full credit for every ABA win and his combined jumps to 72.1, passing Kevin Durant and pulling even with Kobe Bryant in the top 20.

Drop it to 50% the skeptic’s position and he’s still at 62.6, which ranks him 25th or 26th. Even the harshest possible discount on his ABA career leaves him firmly in the top 30.

The question this profile is really asking is: how much was the ABA worth?

The NBA Career, Alone

Before getting into the ABA debate, it’s worth establishing what Erving did in the NBA by itself, because the “he was just an ABA star” framing undersells his 11 seasons in Philadelphia significantly.

Here is every NBA season:

1976-77: +3.34 · Philadelphia, 50-32, first NBA season 1977-78: +4.31 · Philadelphia, 55-27 1978-79: +1.90 · Philadelphia, 47-35 weakest NBA season 1979-80: +6.43 · Philadelphia, 59-23 first peak, Finals appearance 1980-81: +7.55 · Career NBA peak 62 wins, Finals appearance 1981-82: +5.78 · Philadelphia, 58-24 1982-83: +6.38 · Philadelphia, 65-17 NBA championship 1983-84: +3.82 · Philadelphia, 52-30 1984-85: +4.71 · Philadelphia, 58-24 Finals appearance 1985-86: +3.11 · Philadelphia, 54-28 1986-87: +1.45 · Philadelphia, 45-37 final season

NBA regular season total: 48.8 net wins across 11 seasons. Average: 4.43 per season.

That average is higher than Kevin Garnett (2.65), higher than Dirk Nowitzki (3.35), higher than Charles Barkley (3.07). It’s higher than most players in the entire database. The formula sees an 11-year NBA career of genuine excellence not a declining star whose prime happened somewhere else.

The playoff record adds another 4.28 Net Wins across all 11 playoff appearances, including a 1982-83 championship season where the Sixers went 12-1.

So: 52.5 combined net wins on NBA data alone. That ranks him around 27th or 28th all time without a single ABA season counted. The ABA is a bonus, not a foundation.

The ABA Seasons

The five ABA seasons are where the formula produces its most interesting numbers and where the most important methodological question lives.

1971-72: +0.34 · Virginia Squires, 45-39 rookie year, 21 years old 1972-73: +0.85 · Virginia Squires, 42-42 development season 1973-74: +5.82 · New York Nets, 55-29 first ABA championship 1974-75: +6.56 · New York Nets, 58-26 ABA peak, second championship 1975-76: +5.49 · New York Nets, 55-29 final ABA season

ABA raw total: 19.1 net wins across 5 seasons.

Notice the shape of those numbers. The first two ABA seasons at 21 and 22 years old on a mediocre Virginia Squires team produced almost nothing by this formula. +0.34 and +0.85 are effectively zero. Then Erving joined the New York Nets, and the formula sees exactly what happened: three consecutive elite seasons, two championships, and some of the most dominant individual performance in the history of professional basketball.

His ABA peak of +6.56 in 1974-75 is nearly identical to his NBA peak of +7.55 in 1980-81. Whatever competitive gap existed between the leagues, Erving’s individual contributions to wins converted at essentially the same rate in both. That is a meaningful data point.

The Discount Debate

The 90% default isn’t arbitrary, but it isn’t provable either. Here is what each discount level implies and what it would take to justify it.

100% discount (full credit): The ABA was equivalent to the NBA. This is the maximalist position. It’s hard to defend completely the ABA drew from a smaller talent pool and had less depth but the top end of the ABA was unquestionably NBA quality. The Nets, Colonels, and Nuggets would have competed in the NBA playoffs. Erving at 100% ranks #20 all time.

90% discount (the default): The ABA was 90% as competitive as the NBA. This is a reasonable center position. It acknowledges the talent gap without dismissing five seasons of dominance on championship-caliber teams. Erving at 90% ranks #21 all time.

75% discount: The ABA was significantly inferior closer to a high-level minor league than a true competitor. This is aggressive but defensible given the small markets, financial instability, and uneven roster depth outside the top teams. Erving at 75% ranks #22 or 23 all time essentially unchanged.

50% discount: The ABA was worth half an NBA season. This is the skeptic’s floor. At this level, Erving’s ABA career contributes 9.5 net wins meaningful but not transformative. He still ranks 25th or 26th. The 50% position requires believing that ABA championships were essentially exhibition wins, which the historical record doesn’t support.

The striking thing about running these numbers is how stable Erving’s ranking is across the range. Whether you believe the ABA at 50% or 100%, you get essentially the same answer: he belongs in the top 25 all time, and probably the top 22.

The only scenario where the ABA discount changes his story dramatically is if you believe the NBA-only case puts him outside the top 30 and it doesn’t. His 11 NBA seasons alone produce a top-28 career. The ABA is additional evidence, not the foundation.

What the Formula Misses

The Net Wins formula counts points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks. It does not count dunks.

That sounds like a joke. It isn’t.

Julius Erving redefined what basketball could look like. The 1976 ABA Slam Dunk Contest. The baseline move against the Lakers in the 1983 Finals. The degree of difficulty he brought to routine plays. None of that appears in the formula’s inputs. The formula sees a player whose positive contributions converted into wins at a 4.43 per season rate across 11 NBA seasons. It does not see the most influential individual player of his generation, the man who made the NBA worth watching to an entire demographic, the person David Stern later credited as central to the league’s survival and growth.

That cultural contribution is real and significant. The formula has no opinion about it, which is not the same as saying it doesn’t matter. It means the formula is measuring one specific thing contextual contribution to wins and that specific thing lands Erving at #21.

If you believe cultural impact deserves weight in an all-time ranking, Erving moves up. How far is a matter of judgment the formula deliberately avoids.

How Other Lists Rank Him

Ranking list Erving’s rank Notes

Net Wins (this formula) #21 At 90% ABA discount

Net Wins at 100% ABA #20 Passes Durant, ties Kobe

Net Wins at 50% ABA #26 NBA career alone is #28

ESPN Top 100 (2020) #11 High ABA credit implied

BR All-Time VORP #18 Strong peak value captured

Bill Simmons Pyramid #13 ”Level 2” — untouchable

NBA 75th Anniversary Team NamedOne of the 75 greatest

BR HoF Probability100% Easy first-ballot

The conventional consensus puts Erving around 11th to 15th all time, significantly higher than this formula’s 21st. The gap reflects something specific: most traditional ranking systems give full or near-full credit for ABA accomplishments, while this formula’s 90% default applies a modest but consistent discount.

At 100% ABA credit, the gap nearly closes. At 90%, the formula is saying exactly this: Erving’s ABA career was great, but the competitive discount matters, and his NBA career, while excellent, doesn’t rank quite as highly as the cultural narrative around him suggests.

The Larger Argument

Julius Erving presents the cleanest possible test case for the ABA discount question. His career splits almost perfectly into two halves, five ABA seasons of dominance followed by 11 NBA seasons of excellence, with a clear championship in each league.

The formula’s answer is consistent across discount levels: he belongs in the top 25 all time, and the precise position depends almost entirely on how you value the ABA.

That is not a knockdown argument for or against any specific ranking. It is a precise description of exactly where the uncertainty lives. Most ranking systems don’t tell you that. They give you a number and imply it’s settled.

This one tells you: if you think the ABA was 90% as good as the NBA, Erving is 21st. If you think it was 75%, he’s 22nd. If you think it was 100%, he’s 20th. The difference between those positions is a single assumption about competitive context.

The interactive database lets you move the slider yourself. That is the honest way to rank Julius Erving.

By the Numbers

24,815 Career points (NBA + ABA) 10,525 Career rebounds 5,176 Career assists 2 ABA championships 1 NBA championship 4 MVP awards

What Others Saw

“There has never been a player who meant more to a league than Julius Erving meant to the ABA. And I don’t think there’s been a player who meant more to the survival of the NBA in its darkest moment than Julius Erving did in the early 1980s.” — David Stern, NBA Commissioner

“Julius Erving was the reason I wanted to play basketball. Not for what he did on the stat sheet. For what he made possible — for the idea that the game could be something more than just winning.” — Magic Johnson

“You couldn’t stop him. You could try to make it harder, but there was always a play he had that you hadn’t seen. He was ahead of everyone — the game caught up to him eventually, but for a long time he was playing a different sport.” — Larry Bird

The full Net Wins database, 295 NBA players and every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.

Next: Shaquille O’Neal at #6. Subscribe to get it when it drops.

© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.

The full Net Wins database, Every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.

© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

netwins.substack.com

No result in this database is more uncomfortable to write about than this one.

Allen Iverson is one of the most compelling players in NBA history. He is a Hall of Famer, a cultural icon, a first-ballot inductee, and the most physically unlikely superstar the league has ever produced. He played at 165 pounds against men who outweighed him by 60 pounds and he never backed down from any of them. He won four scoring titles. He dragged a undermanned 76ers team to the NBA Finals on sheer will in 2001.

The formula ranks him 111th out of 136 players. His career combined Net Wins is -12.89. He is a net negative by this measure.

That result demands a complete, honest explanation not a dismissal, and not an apology.

Net Wins at a Glance

Regular season: -13.3 · Playoffs: +0.4 · Combined: -12.9

Average per season: -0.95 · Peak season: +4.13 (2000-01) · Top-3 average: +2.57

14 seasons. 1 MVP. 4 scoring titles. 11 All-Star selections. 1 Finals appearance.

Every Season, Laid Out

1996-97: -7.83 · Philadelphia, 22-60

1997-98: -4.58 · Philadelphia, 31-51

1998-99: +0.74 · Philadelphia, 28-22 (lockout-shortened)

1999-00: +2.13 · Philadelphia, 49-33

2000-01: +4.13 · Philadelphia, 56-26 — career peak

2001-02: -0.18 · Philadelphia, 43-39

2002-03: +1.44 · Philadelphia, 48-34

2003-04: -3.59 · Philadelphia, 33-49

2004-05: -0.14 · Philadelphia, 43-39

2005-06: -2.16 · Philadelphia, 38-44

2006-07: +0.31 · Denver, 45-37

2007-08: +1.35 · Denver, 50-32

2008-09: -1.70 · Detroit, 39-43

2009-10: -3.18 · Philadelphia, 27-55

The pattern is impossible to ignore. In seasons where the 76ers won, Iverson’s Net Wins were positive. In seasons where they lost, which was most of his career, they were negative, often significantly. The formula is measuring exactly what happened: a high-usage player whose enormous volume of missed shots and turnovers accumulated against a brutal team loss rate for most of 14 years.

Why the Formula Is Harsh on Iverson Specifically

The Net Wins formula has one structural characteristic that hits Iverson harder than almost any other player in the database: it penalizes high negative action volume on losing teams.

Iverson’s negative actions were substantial by any measure. He attempted more field goals per game than almost anyone in the database. He missed a lot of them, not because he was an inefficient shooter by the standards of his era, but because volume scorers who create their own shot in isolation tend to shoot lower percentages than catch-and-shoot players or players with easier looks. He also turned the ball over at a high rate, partly because he was asked to handle the ball in every difficult situation the Sixers faced.

None of that is a character flaw. It’s a description of what a primary creator does when his team asks him to do everything.

The problem, in the formula’s terms, is the denominator. The formula divides Iverson’s negative actions by his team’s loss rate. In a season where the Sixers went 22-60, that loss rate denominator is enormous, meaning every missed shot and every turnover gets amplified into a large number of player losses. The formula is essentially saying: your negative actions were happening at a rate that mapped almost perfectly onto this team’s losses.

In the two seasons where Philadelphia genuinely won, 1999-00 at 49-33 and 2000-01 at 56-26, Iverson’s Net Wins were positive. The formula is not blind to his value. It sees it clearly when the team context supports it.

The Play Design Objection

Several readers on Reddit raised a sophisticated version of the Iverson critique: the 76ers’ offense was deliberately designed for Iverson to take shots. When plays broke down and teammates took shots instead, that was a failure of execution, not a success. The formula, they argued, can’t distinguish between a shot Iverson was supposed to take and a shot that happened because the play fell apart.

This is a real and legitimate point. The formula has no knowledge of offensive design. It doesn’t know that a Larry Brown isolation for Iverson was the intended outcome and a scramble jumper from Eric Snow was not.

Here is where the objection runs into a limit, though. The formula doesn’t measure whether the play design was correct. It measures whether the outcomes, wins and losses, were served by each player’s specific contributions. And what it finds across 14 seasons is that Iverson’s specific contribution profile, very high positive volume, very high negative volume, correlated more strongly with his teams’ losses than with their wins in most years.

You can believe the play design was right and still accept that the outcomes weren’t always what the team needed. The formula only sees the outcomes.

What the Formula Gets Wrong About Iverson

The honest answer is that it gets some things wrong.

Defensive value is undercounted. Iverson was a legitimate defensive disruptor, 2,307 career steals, a reputation for pestering ball handlers that went beyond what steals can capture. The formula counts his steals but cannot see the deflections, the pressure, the way opposing point guards changed their games against him.

The team context is punishing in a way that may overstate his responsibility. The 1996-97 Sixers went 22-60. Iverson was a 21-year-old rookie. Attributing the full weight of that team’s losses to his missed shots is arguably unfair he was not the reason that team lost 60 games.

Usage rate isn’t accounted for. When a player is asked to take 30 shots a game on a bad team, the formula treats those missed shots the same as missed shots by a player on a good team with good spacing and better looks. That’s a genuine limitation.

What the Formula Gets Right About Iverson

The losing was real. Iverson played 14 seasons. His teams had a losing record in 9 of them. That’s not a statistical artifact, that’s what happened. The formula reflects it.

The 2001 Finals run is captured. His one playoff appearance produced +0.39 Net Wins positive, correctly reflecting a genuine contribution in a genuine run. The formula saw the 2001 Sixers go 13-10 in the playoffs and credited Iverson for his role in it.

His peak was real and the formula sees it. His 2000-01 season at +4.13 is one of the better individual seasons in the database for that year. The formula is not dismissing what he was at his best.

Where Other Lists Rank Him

Net Wins (this formula): #111

ESPN Top 100 (2020): #23

BR All-Time VORP: #38

Bill Simmons Pyramid: #25

BR HOF Probability: 100%

NBA 75th Anniversary Team: Named

Bleacher Report Top 100: #26

The gap between this formula’s ranking (#111) and the conventional consensus (#23-38) is the largest negative gap in the entire database, larger even than Pete Maravich’s gap at #136. Every other major ranking system puts Iverson solidly in the top 30. The Net Wins formula puts him 111th.

That gap is primarily explained by two things: team context and usage. Every other major ranking system adjusts for team quality in some way. Net Wins does not adjust it uses raw team win and loss rates as the denominator, which means players on chronically bad teams get penalized in ways that systems using league-average adjustments do not apply.

Whether that’s a feature or a bug depends on your philosophy. If you believe player value should be measured independently of team quality, Net Wins is too harsh on Iverson. If you believe outcomes, wins and losses, are the only honest measuring stick, the formula is doing exactly what it should.

The Larger Point

Allen Iverson was an extraordinary basketball player who played most of his career on bad teams and was asked to do too much with too little around him. The Net Wins formula cannot fully separate his individual quality from his team’s failures. No formula can.

What it can do, and does, accurately, is measure what actually happened. The wins and losses were real. The missed shots were real. The turnovers were real. The 22-60 season was real.

The formula’s verdict is not that Iverson was a bad player. It’s that his specific contribution profile, high volume, high miss rate, high turnover rate, correlated more with losses than wins in most of the seasons he played. On a better team, with better spacing and less pressure to do everything himself, the formula would look very different.

That’s not a criticism of Allen Iverson the player. It’s a description of what the numbers show when you run them honestly. The practice, it turns out, mattered less than the circumstances.

The full Net Wins database, 295 NBA players and every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.

Next: Shaquille O’Neal at #6. Subscribe to get it when it drops.

© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.

The full Net Wins database, Every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.

© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

netwins.substack.com

No result in this entire database generates more argument than this one.

When the Net Wins formula was first posted on Reddit, the response was immediate and overwhelming. Thousands of comments. Most of them about Scottie Pippen at #9.

Not about Kareem at #1. Not about Duncan at #2. Not about Jordan at #3.

Pippen.

That reaction is the most interesting thing about this ranking and it’s worth taking seriously. The formula put him ninth. The crowd pushed back hard. One of those two things is wrong. This post makes the case that it isn’t the formula.

Net Wins at a Glance

Regular season: 84.8 · Playoffs: +8.5 · Combined: 93.4

Average per season: 4.99 · Peak season: 10.63 (1995-96) · Top-3 average: 10.15

17 seasons. 6 championships. 7 All-Star selections. 10 All-Defensive Team selections. The most feared wing defender of his generation.

Every Season, Laid Out

1987-88: +0.71 · Rookie year, 50-win Bulls 1988-89: +2.33 · Building toward something 1989-90: +5.02 · First elite season, 55 wins 1990-91: +6.90 · First championship, 15-2 playoff run 1991-92: +10.24 · Career peak, 67 wins, second title 1992-93: +6.34 · Third consecutive title 1993-94: +6.47 · Jordan retires, Pippen leads Bulls to 55 wins 1994-95: +3.49 · Jordan returns midseason 1995-96: +10.63 · Season peak, 72 wins, fourth title 1996-97: +9.57 · Fifth title, 69 wins 1997-98: +8.19 · Sixth title, last dance 1998-99: +1.97 · Houston Rockets, lockout-shortened season 1999-00: +4.74 · Portland Western Conference Finals 2000-01: +3.58 · Portland 2001-02: +3.27 · Portland 2002-03: +3.40 · Portland 2003-04: -2.00 · Final season, 23-win Chicago team

Look at 1993-94. Jordan retired after the 1992-93 season. Pippen inherited the Bulls, led them to 55 wins, more than most franchises managed with their best player healthy and took them to Game 7 of the second round. His Net Wins that season: +6.47. One of the best individual regular season performances in the database that year, produced entirely without Jordan on the roster.

The formula didn’t need to know Jordan was gone. It just saw a player whose contributions converted into wins at an elite rate. That’s the answer to the sidekick argument.

The Playoff Case

Six championship runs produce 8.54 playoff Net Wins:

1990-91 (15-2): +1.72 · First title, historically dominant run 1991-92 (15-7): +1.26 · Second title 1992-93 (15-4): +1.54 · Third title 1995-96 (15-3): +1.49 · Fourth title, 72-win season 1996-97 (15-4): +1.28 · Fifth title 1997-98 (15-6): +1.26 · Sixth title

Six playoff runs. Six positive Net Wins contributions. No negative playoff seasons. The formula rewards players whose positive contributions translated into wins in the most important games of the year. Pippen played in 90 playoff wins over six championship runs and produced positive net contributions in every one of those runs.

That is an extraordinary record. It is a large part of why he ranks ninth all time rather than fifteenth or twentieth.

The Objection Everyone Makes

“He only won because of Jordan.”

This is the most common objection and it deserves a direct answer.

Yes, Jordan was the best player on those Bulls teams. Yes, Pippen benefited from playing alongside the greatest scorer in NBA history. Those things are true.

But consider what the formula actually measures. It measures whether Pippen’s individual positive actions, his points, his rebounds, his assists, his steals, his blocks converted into wins at an elite rate relative to his teammates. It measures whether his negative actions, his missed shots, his turnovers, his fouls, were minimized relative to how those actions typically contributed to losses on his specific teams.

The formula’s answer across 17 seasons is consistent: yes, on both counts. His positive contributions converted into wins at a higher rate than the average contributor on those teams. His negative contributions were kept low enough that they rarely showed up in losses.

Jordan doesn’t appear anywhere in that calculation. The formula has no knowledge of who else was on the floor. It just sees Pippen’s numbers relative to his team’s win and loss rates. And what it sees, across 17 seasons, is a player who almost never hurt his team and consistently helped it win.

The 1993-94 Proof

The cleanest way to settle the “sidekick” debate is to look at the one season Jordan wasn’t there.

Pippen led the 1993-94 Bulls to 55 wins. His Net Wins that season was +6.47 his fourth best regular season in the database. For comparison, Kevin Durant’s career average is 3.47. Dirk Nowitzki’s career average is 3.35. Pippen without Jordan produced a season that would be a career year for either of those players.

The formula doesn’t make a philosophical argument about Pippen’s independence from Jordan. The 1993-94 season makes it for you.

What the Formula Misses

The Net Wins formula counts steals and blocks. It does not capture positioning, communication, help defense rotations, or the psychological effect of the best wing defender in the league standing between an opponent and the basket.

Pippen won six All-Defensive First Team selections and four All-Defensive Second Team selections. Ten All-Defensive teams total. That represents a decade of being recognized as the best or second-best defender at his position in the entire league.

The formula sees the steals, 2,307 career steals, fifth all time. It does not see the dozens of possessions per game where Pippen’s positioning prevented a steal from being necessary. His true defensive impact is almost certainly larger than what the formula can measure.

His ranking at ninth, in other words, may actually understate him.

Where Other Lists Rank Him

Net Wins (this formula): #9 ESPN Top 100 (2020): #20 BR All-Time VORP: #16 Bill Simmons Pyramid: #17 BR HOF Probability: 100% NBA 75th Anniversary Team: Named Bleacher Report Top 100: #18

The gap between this formula’s ranking (#9) and the conventional consensus (#17-20) is the largest such gap for any player in the top twenty. Every major system recognizes Pippen as a Hall of Famer and an all-time great. The disagreement is purely about degree.

The Net Wins formula’s position: a player who produces +10.63 in his peak season, +10.24 in his second-best season, never has a negative playoff run across six championship appearances, and produces +6.47 in the season his superstar teammate retires, that player belongs in the top 10.

In His Own Words

“Michael and I were very different players. He was the greatest scorer who ever lived. But I think people forget that I guarded their best player every single night. I set up the offense. I got everyone else involved. I was comfortable being everything the team needed me to be.” — Scottie Pippen

“People ask me what it felt like to play with Michael. I ask them what it felt like to have Scottie Pippen on their team. Because that’s the question most people never think to ask.” — Scottie Pippen, 2021

What Others Saw

“Scottie Pippen is the best small forward I’ve ever coached. And I’ve coached some good ones. He could have been the best player in the league on any other team. I don’t say that to diminish Michael. I say it because it’s simply true.” — Phil Jackson

“Pip was the key to everything we did. He guarded Magic, he guarded Drexler, he guarded Ewing. There was nobody he couldn’t guard. That’s a different kind of greatness than scoring. It’s a harder kind.” — Michael Jordan

“If you put Scottie Pippen on a team with three average starters and two bench guys, they make the playoffs. He was the best player on the floor in every game he played except the ones Michael was in. And even then it was close.” — Charles Barkley

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

Pippen’s placement at ninth is a test case for the entire methodology of this book.

If you think the formula is wrong, you need to say exactly where it overcounts him. Is it the championships? Then you believe championships shouldn’t count. Is it the defensive contribution? Then you believe steals and blocks overvalue defense. Is it the team context that Jordan inflated his numbers? Then you believe the same team context argument applies to every player on this list, including Jordan, Russell, and Bird.

The formula is consistent. It applies the same logic to every player in every era. The gap between Jordan (#3, combined 88.2) and Pippen (#9, combined 93.4) is partly explained by Jordan’s two retirements and his Washington years. By the careers they actually had, not the careers the narrative says they should have had, the distance between them is smaller than anyone has ever publicly acknowledged.

That is the honest, uncomfortable conclusion the Net Wins formula delivers. Scottie Pippen was closer to Michael Jordan than the media, the public, or Pippen’s own contract ever acknowledged.

That’s not a contrarian take. It’s the math.

The full Net Wins database, 295 NBA players and every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.

Next: Shaquille O’Neal at #6. Subscribe to get it when it drops.

© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.

The full Net Wins database, Every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.

© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

netwins.substack.com

Every generation forgets its own giants.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is the NBA’s all-time leading scorer. He won six MVP awards, more than anyone in the history of the league. He played twenty seasons, won six championships across two franchises, and was still a meaningful contributor at 41 years old. He stood alongside Muhammad Ali and Jim Brown at the intersection of the civil rights movement and professional basketball, using his platform in ways that cost him commercially and never once apologized for it.

And yet when you ask a casual basketball fan to rank the greatest players of all time, Kareem is rarely the first name out of their mouth. Jordan. LeBron. Magic. Shaq. He drifts down the list in popular memory despite the fact that the statistical record is unambiguous.

That’s what the formula is for. It doesn’t have a memory. It doesn’t care what the highlights looked like or whose face was on the poster. It measures one thing: how much did this player’s actions contribute to winning and losing, calibrated against what it actually cost their team to do both.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: +144.0 combined Net Wins. 20 seasons. #1 all time.

Tim Duncan is #2 at 143.5. The gap is smaller than I expected. Everything else about what the formula found surprised me.

What I Expected

I expected Kareem to rank first on career totals. Twenty seasons of elite production is an almost impossible accumulation to overcome, and the formula rewards longevity when longevity comes with sustained quality. A player who produces +6 net wins per season for 20 years will outscore a player who produces +10 for 10 years. Kareem’s combination of volume and duration made the career total feel like a foregone conclusion.

What I did not expect was the peak.

The Peak Nobody Talks About

Kareem’s second, third, and fourth years in the league produced net win totals that the formula has never seen from any other player in the database:

1970-71 Milwaukee Bucks (66-16): +13.01 net wins 1971-72 Milwaukee Bucks (63-19): +12.64 net wins 1972-73 Milwaukee Bucks (60-22): +10.02 net wins

Those numbers are not normal. To put them in context: Michael Jordan’s best single season in this database is +11.48. LeBron James peaks at +11.46. Larry Bird’s best is +11.32. Kareem’s second year in the league produced a number that no other player in 80 years of NBA history has matched.

The 1971 Bucks went 66-16 and won the championship. Kareem was 23 years old. He averaged 31.7 points, 16.0 rebounds, and 3.3 assists on a team where the second-best player was Oscar Robertson, himself one of the greatest of all time, in the final years of his career. The formula sees a 23-year-old operating at a level of efficiency so far above his team’s winning standard that his individual contribution registers as nearly impossible.

His rookie season in 1969-70 produced +8.09 net wins. In the context of the full database, that is an outstanding season. It is not even in Kareem’s top five.

Milwaukee: The Years Everyone Forgets

The public memory of Kareem tends to be organized around the Showtime Lakers. The Magic Johnson era, the championships, the Hollywood franchise. That framing is understandable. The Lakers were glamorous. Magic was ascending. The 1980s were when basketball became a television phenomenon.

But the formula sees something the highlights don’t show. The Milwaukee years were Kareem at his absolute ceiling.

From 1969 to 1975, playing for a small-market franchise in Wisconsin with limited national exposure, Kareem put up five of his top six Net Wins seasons. The lone interruption was 1974-75, his final year in Milwaukee before demanding a trade. The Bucks went 38-44 that season and the formula logged his only negative year at -0.40, a direct reflection of what happens when the win/loss context collapses around a player.

He was 27 years old, already four seasons into what would have been considered a complete Hall of Fame career, when he left for Los Angeles. The trade was controversial. The city of Milwaukee was devastated. The basketball world saw it as Kareem choosing glamour over loyalty.

What they got in Los Angeles was a second act that most players never achieve in their first.

The Lakers: A Different Kind of Greatness

Magic Johnson’s rookie year, 1979-80, produced +9.68 net wins for Kareem. That is his fourth-best season. He was 32 years old.

This is the season the historical narrative tends to hand to Magic. The Lakers went 60-22. Magic famously started at center in Game 6 of the Finals with Kareem injured and scored 42 points. It became one of the defining moments of the decade. Magic Johnson was named Finals MVP.

The formula is indifferent to Game 6. It sees the entire season. What it sees is a 32-year-old Kareem producing at a rate comparable to what LeBron James produced in his prime, on the same team as Magic Johnson in his first year, when the public narrative was already beginning to shift toward his younger teammate.

From 1979 through 1987, Kareem never had a season below +5.79 net wins. He won four championships in that stretch. He won the MVP award in 1980 at age 32, becoming the oldest MVP in league history at that point. He was named Finals MVP in 1985 at 37, the oldest player ever to win that award.

His 18th season in the league, 1986-87, produced +7.31 net wins. He was 39 years old. The formula shows him contributing at an elite level, not a “he’s still useful for his age” level. By the Net Wins standard, that season is better than the best seasons of Clyde Drexler, Reggie Miller, and Gary Payton, all Hall of Famers in their prime years.

Why the Public Forgets

There are a few reasons Kareem drifts from the top of the conversation.

The most obvious is that he was not particularly interested in being remembered on other people’s terms. He didn’t court the media, didn’t perform for cameras, didn’t build the kind of charismatic public persona that makes athletes permanently visible in the cultural memory. Magic was warm and open. Jordan was competitive and electric. Shaq was funny. LeBron is omnipresent. Kareem was private, intellectual, politically engaged, and unwilling to perform happiness for public consumption.

He was also politically present in ways that made him a complicated figure commercially during his career and in the decades since. He stood with Muhammad Ali when Ali refused military induction. He boycotted the 1968 Olympics before they were famous for boycotts. He converted to Islam in 1971 and changed his name from Lew Alcindor, which cost him endorsements and generated real hostility from a country not yet ready to see a prominent Black athlete make that choice publicly. He spoke and wrote about race in America with a directness that made people uncomfortable then and still does now.

None of that shows up in the formula. But all of it explains why his career is persistently undervalued in the popular imagination.

The Number That Matters

20 seasons. 6 MVP awards. 6 championships. The all-time scoring record by a margin that stood for 38 years before LeBron broke it in 2023.

Combined Net Wins: +144.0.

That number is the accumulation of 1,560 regular season games, each one measured against what his team needed to win on that specific night, normalized against what it cost them every time they lost. It is not a tribute. It does not know about the skyhook or the championships or the activism or the decades of being underappreciated in his own legacy.

It just counts. And when you count everything, every game, every season, every team, every era, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is first.

The surprise wasn’t the career total. It was the peak. A three-year stretch in Milwaukee that the formula rates as the highest sustained individual performance in 80 years of professional basketball. A 23-year-old on a team in a small city, playing at a level the numbers have never seen before or since.

We forgot about it. The formula didn’t.

The full Net Wins database, 295 NBA players and every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.

Next: Shaquille O’Neal at #6. Subscribe to get it when it drops.

© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved..

The full Net Wins database, Every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.

© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame inducts its class every September. The process is notoriously opaque — committee-driven, lobbying-dependent, and shaped as much by narrative as by numbers. Players who defined their era sometimes wait decades. Others slip through permanently.

I ran every retired, non-active player in the Net Wins database through the composite ranking — the formula that weighs combined career net wins, per-season average, and peak three-season average equally. Then I filtered out everyone already inducted.

Five names came out at the top. None of them belongs in the category of “snubbed great.” They belong in the more interesting category of players whose contributions didn’t fit the story the Hall tends to tell.

1. Shawn Marion — The Matrix

Net Wins composite rank among all non-HOF retirees: #1

Regular season: +43.8 net wins · Playoffs: +0.1 · Combined: +43.9 Avg/season: 3.98 · Top-3 avg: 6.64 · Peak: 8.06 (2004-05 Phoenix, 62 wins) Seasons: 11 · Era: 1999-2011

The formula’s answer to “who is the best non-HOF retired player” is Shawn Marion, and the reason is straightforward once you see the numbers. Marion produced nearly four net wins per season across 11 years — a rate that matches or exceeds several players who are in the Hall — while doing it in a way that never produced a single statistical category that showed up on a highlight reel.

Marion’s peak was the 2004-05 Phoenix Suns — the Steve Nash MVP season, the seven-seconds-or-less offense, the 62-win team that announced a new era of basketball. Nash won the MVP. Mike D’Antoni got the credit. Marion’s contribution to that team by the Net Wins formula: +8.06 — the highest individual single-season mark on the team, higher than Nash’s own +7.44 that year.

He did it by doing everything. Points off cuts and offensive rebounds. Defensive versatility that let him cover positions one through five depending on the possession. Steals, blocks, and rebounds in a volume that almost no small forward in the league matched. His career averages — 15.2 points, 9.4 rebounds, 1.7 steals, 1.2 blocks — are genuinely unusual. Only four players in NBA history averaged at least 15-9-1.5-1.0 for a career. Three of them are in the Hall.

The reason Marion isn’t discussed as a Hall of Fame candidate comes down to aesthetics. His shooting form was famously strange — a flat, push-shot jumper that analysts spent years questioning even as the shots went in at 47% from the field. He wasn’t a lead scorer who could get his own shot in isolation. He wasn’t a primary ball-handler or a playmaker. On the seven-seconds Suns, he was the engine nobody talked about because Nash and Amar’e were the faces.

When the Suns traded him to Miami in 2008 for Dwayne Wade, the narrative was that the Suns had moved on and Marion was a complementary piece being swapped for a star. He then went to Dallas, won the 2011 NBA championship, and played well into his mid-thirties producing positive net wins on winning teams.

A career that ran 11 seasons, peaked at one of the highest single-season marks for a forward in the 2000s, never had a year below +1.29 except one bad season on a 29-53 team, and ended with a championship ring. The Hall hasn’t called. There’s no obvious reason why.

2. Shawn Kemp — The Reign Man

Photo by Lipofsky / CC BY-SA 3.0

Net Wins composite rank among non-HOF retirees: #2

Regular season: +39.9 net wins · Playoffs: -0.2 · Combined: +39.7 Avg/season: 3.63 · Top-3 avg: 7.35 · Peak: 8.38 (1995-96 Seattle, 64 wins) Seasons: 11 · Era: 1989-2000

Shawn Kemp’s case is different from Marion’s, and the difference is honest. Marion never had an explanation for why he wasn’t inducted. Kemp does — he battled substance abuse issues that disrupted his career and remain part of his public profile. The Hall is technically a merit-based institution, but it’s a human institution too, and narrative matters.

The formula doesn’t weigh any of that. What it sees is this: for a seven-year stretch from 1992 to 1997, Shawn Kemp was one of the most dominant power forwards in basketball. His peak of +8.38 in 1995-96 on the 64-win SuperSonics is the highest single-season mark in this entire group and one of the highest ever recorded by a power forward in the database.

Those seven seasons — from his third year through age 27 — produced a composite so strong that it still holds up across his full career, including the steep decline years in Cleveland. Even counting 1999-00 (−0.75 on a 32-50 team) and the ghost-of-himself seasons that followed his move from Seattle, his career average of 3.63 net wins per season remains excellent.

The Sonics teams he anchored went 55-27, 63-19, 64-18, and 57-25 in consecutive seasons. His top-three average of 7.35 is the second highest in this group and comparable to players already in the Hall. Gary Payton was the face of those teams. Kemp was the heartbeat.

His career arc — explosive rise, dominant prime, early decline — is the template for how substance issues alter careers and legacies. Whether that’s a Hall of Fame consideration is a judgment call the formula doesn’t make. What it can say is that the basketball he played at his peak was Hall of Fame basketball.

3. Horace Grant — The Forgotten Bull

Photo by Cybersonant / CC BY-SA 4.0

Net Wins composite rank among non-HOF retirees: #3

Regular season: +37.0 net wins · Playoffs: +1.6 · Combined: +38.7 Avg/season: 4.63 · Top-3 avg: 5.99 · Peak: 7.20 (1991-92 Chicago, 67 wins) Seasons: 8 · Era: 1987-2001

Horace Grant’s composite rank is driven entirely by one number: his per-season average of 4.63 net wins. That is the highest average among any player in this group, and it ranks him in the same territory as players like Clyde Drexler, Gary Payton, and Kevin McHale — all of whom are in the Hall.

Grant played only eight seasons in this database, which limits his career totals, but the quality of those eight seasons is consistently elite. He was the best-kept secret on the three-peat Bulls — a power forward who guarded the opposing team’s best big, cleared the glass, ran the floor, and provided the defensive infrastructure that let Jordan and Pippen play freely on the offensive end.

His peak season — 1991-92 on the 67-win Bulls — produced +7.20 net wins. That is a Jordan-era Bulls season where Horace Grant outscored Pippen (+6.08) and was within range of Jordan (+7.87) by this formula. On one of the greatest teams in NBA history, Grant was essentially a co-equal to Scottie Pippen in terms of individual contribution to wins.

He then left Chicago, joined Shaquille O’Neal in Orlando, and helped build the mid-90s Magic into a Finals team. He later won a fourth championship with the 2000 Lakers. Four rings across three franchises. The formula’s highest per-season average among all non-HOF candidates.

The reason Grant isn’t in the Hall is probably the simplest one: he was never the best player on any of his teams. Jordan was better. Pippen was more famous. Shaq was more dominant. O’Neal was more celebrated. Grant was always the third or fourth name mentioned when people talked about those teams — and the Hall tends to induct the names people mention first.

4. Detlef Schrempf — The Underrated Pioneer

Photo by Indiana Pacers Historical / CC BY 2.0

Net Wins composite rank among non-HOF retirees: #4

Regular season: +46.8 net wins · Playoffs: −0.2 · Combined: +46.6 Avg/season: 3.35 · Top-3 avg: 6.56 · Peak: 7.32 (1993-94 Seattle, 63 wins) Seasons: 14 · Era: 1985-2000

Detlef Schrempf has the highest combined net wins of any player in this group — 46.6, more than Marion, more than Kemp, more than Grant. The reason he ranks fourth rather than first is that his per-season average of 3.35 is pulled down by early and late career seasons on below-.500 teams, and the composite scoring penalizes that.

But the career totals are real. Fourteen seasons. Three Sixth Man of the Year awards (the most ever). A perennial All-Star in Indiana and Seattle. One of the first European players to become a consistent NBA starter and a key piece on two Western Conference Finals teams.

His three seasons with the 63-win Sonics (1993-94), 64-win Sonics (1995-96), and 57-win Sonics (1996-97) represent a three-year peak of 7.32, 6.60, and 4.86 net wins respectively — the kind of sustained excellence that usually gets players inducted.

The Schrempf case is partly about timing and partly about role. He came into the league as a bench player and spent years as a Sixth Man before becoming a full starter — which compressed the years during which he was accumulating the kind of stardom the Hall rewards. And when he did become a star, he was doing it in Indiana (small market, limited national exposure) before moving to Seattle (larger market, but Payton remained the face of the franchise).

He is probably the most statistically overlooked player in 1990s basketball. The formula puts him ahead of Allen Iverson, Tracy McGrady, Carmelo Anthony, and a long list of Hall of Famers by career combined net wins. He has never been a serious Hall of Fame finalist.

5. Kevin Johnson — Point God Before the Term Existed

Photo by PhoenixSports77 / CC BY-SA 3.0

Net Wins composite rank among non-HOF retirees: #5

Regular season: +42.6 net wins · Playoffs: −0.4 · Combined: +42.2 Avg/season: 3.87 · Top-3 avg: 5.83 · Peak: 6.03 (tied, 1988-89 and 1992-93 Phoenix) Seasons: 11 · Era: 1987-1998

Kevin Johnson spent eleven seasons as the starting point guard for the Phoenix Suns and produced 42.6 regular season net wins — more than Steve Nash did in his first tenure in Phoenix, comparable to Jason Kidd in his prime, and ahead of multiple HOF point guards in total career value.

His peak seasons — Phoenix’s 1988-89 and 1992-93 teams — both produced +6.03 net wins and came with the Suns making deep playoff runs. KJ was one of the most explosive scoring point guards of his era, a legitimate top-five player at his position for most of the early-to-mid 1990s.

The reason he’s not in the Hall is the same reason he’s not in the public memory the way Nash or Kidd are: he played most of his peak years before the internet made everything permanent, in a market (Phoenix) that had limited national television exposure, on teams that got to the Finals once but never won. He is also widely understood to have left the game early — he retired at 32 with considerable basketball still in him — due in part to chronic knee problems that had already cost him multiple seasons.

The Hall considers off-court factors. Johnson’s career has been complicated by serious personal allegations that arose after his playing days and have affected his legacy. Whether those considerations belong in a basketball evaluation is a separate debate the formula doesn’t enter.

What the formula says is: eleven seasons, 42.6 net wins, consistent elite performance through age 30, a three-year peak comparable to anyone at the position in his era. The basketball record is Hall of Fame caliber.

What These Five Have in Common

The Hall of Fame rewards a specific kind of greatness: volume scoring, MVP awards, Finals appearances, and the ability to be the best player on a championship team. The five players here generally had one or two of those things but not all of them.

Marion was never a volume scorer. Kemp had his career interrupted. Grant was always the third-best player on the team. Schrempf came up as a role player before transitioning to star. Johnson played in an era before every moment was digitized.

The Net Wins formula doesn’t care about any of that. It measures one thing: how much did this player’s statistical contributions convert into actual wins and losses, relative to the team context they played in? By that measure, all five of these players performed at a level that would typically earn Hall of Fame consideration.

The formula isn’t arguing they were robbed. It’s pointing out that the Hall uses a different set of criteria — and that those criteria have a systematic bias toward players who scored a lot and played on famous teams. Players who contributed broadly across multiple statistical categories, played excellent complementary roles, or had their careers cut short by injury or circumstance tend to accumulate exactly the kind of quiet excellence this formula is designed to find.

The database is at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins. Every player, every season, every number behind this article.

© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.

The full Net Wins database, Every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.

© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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In a recent discussion on r/NBATalk, a reader posed a fascinating mathematical challenge to the Net Wins formula.

The argument was simple: If Tim Duncan puts up the exact same elite stats (20/12/3) on a 65-win Spurs team versus a 20-win “bottom feeder” Spurs team, his Net Wins score in my formula would swing from a +9.7 to a -8.3.

The critic’s conclusion? The formula is “susceptible to team strength rather than individual ability.”

My response? That isn’t a bug. It’s the entire point.

Realized Value vs. Hypothetical Talent

Most modern basketball analytics (like PER or Win Shares) try to “normalize” a player. They want to tell you how good a player is regardless of his surroundings. They are looking for “Talent.”

Net Wins doesn’t care about talent. It cares about receipts.

In the NBA, the only thing that actually exists at the end of the season is the win-loss record. If a team only wins 20 games, there simply aren’t enough “wins” in the building for a superstar to claim 13 of them. You cannot “own” a majority share of a success that never happened.

The “Empty Stats” Reality

We’ve all seen the player who puts up 28 points per game on a team that finishes 14th in the conference. Traditional stats call that an “All-Star season.” Net Wins calls it Empty Stats.

If your elite production isn’t translating into a higher-than-average win rate for your specific roster’s output, the formula treats your “positives” as less valuable. Why? Because in a 20-win season, those points didn’t actually buy anything.

Why Duncan is #2

The reason Tim Duncan sits at #2 all-time in this system—above LeBron and Jordan—is because of his Sustained Winning Volume. Duncan didn’t just have high “talent” peaks; he was the primary engine for 50+ wins for nineteen straight seasons. He never had a “20-win Spurs” year. Because he kept the win-denominator high for two decades, every positive action he took was “backed by gold” (actual wins).

The Verdict

If you want to know who would win a 1-on-1 tournament in a vacuum, use a different list. But if you want to know who actually accounted for the most winning basketball in NBA history, you have to look at the record.

In this formula, Actual Wins are the only currency that matters.

The full Net Wins database, 295 NBA players and every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.

Next: Shaquille O’Neal at #6. Subscribe to get it when it drops.

© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.

The full Net Wins database, Every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.

© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.