Before the 2021-22 season, the NBA chose its 75 greatest players to celebrate its 75 seasons of play. However, that process notably ended with 76 players chosen because a tie in the voting process. The full list, which features a who's who of Hall of Famers, can be found here.
Now that we've hit another round number with 80 seasons in the books, we can correct that imbalance by naming four new players to a hypothetical NBA Top 80 list. All 76 players chosen, either in 2021 or initially for the NBA's top 50 list during the 1996-97 season, will stay put. Only four new players get slots.
We are not limiting ourselves to players with newly minted candidacies, though. Anyone who has ever stepped on an NBA court and was not chosen for that 2021 list of 76 players is eligible. We will judge players exclusively on the merits of what they have accomplished through the 2025-26 season.
That means retired players, whose entire careers are complete, will actually have an edge over active players, but the counterpoint is that most retired players have been passed over at least once, whereas some of our active choices were simply too young and unaccomplished when the 2021 list was made to garner serious consideration. So how are we going to do this? Well, to be blunt, there are two no-brainers here.
We'll start there before making the two agonizing final choices. A total of 16 players have won multiple NBA MVP awards, and of those 16 players, 14 were on the NBA's Top 75 list. The two who weren't at the time were both relatively early in their careers.
Nikola Jokić had just won his first MVP award, but had only played six NBA seasons when the list was published. Shaquille O'Neal made the top 50 with no MVP awards and only four full years of experience, but he had led a team to the NBA Finals, which Jokić, to that point, had not. With 2011 MVP winner Derrick Rose also excluded, there was at least some basis for ignoring another MVP winner from that initial list based on experience.
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