The Basketball 100

A celebration of basketball by way of the 100 greatest players in NBA history, from The Athletic's foremost basketball writers and analysts. With a foreword by Charles Barkley.

In this work of basketball history, 100 player profiles paint vivid portraits of the game's most compelling characters. There's George Mikan, who was cut from his high school team because he wore glasses, then went on to become the fledgling NBA's first transcendent star. Gary Payton, called "The Glove" for his skintight defense, who talked as much trash to his teammates as he did to his opponents. Dennis Rodman, who started playing basketball at age 20, and in a few short years went from working as a janitor at the airport to being one of the strangest superstars the sport has ever known. Allen Iverson, who drew inspiration from hip hop for his inimitable style. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who was so dominant in the paint that they changed the rules - and Steph Curry, who was so dominant outside it that he seemed to expand the very boundaries of the court.

The Basketball 100, edited by award-winning reporters David Aldridge and John Hollinger, also tackles the game's toughest questions: How should we weigh championship rings versus statistical profiles versus the "eye test"? Were the great players of yesteryear, like Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell, propelled by the inferior athleticism of their competition, or would they have been transcendent in any era? And of course, the book dives deep into the GOAT debate - MJ or LeBron? For the book, Hollinger (a pioneer in sports analytics and inventor of the statistical metric PER) has created a new benchmark, GOAT Points.