The Golden State Warriors will return to action on Tuesday evening with a high-profile match-up against the Denver Nuggets. Before his team takes the floor again, however, two-time NBA MVP Stephen Curry was busy on Monday evening, spending time at the launch of his new Facebook Live show, Stephen vs. The Game.
In addition to simple promotion, though, Curry made waves by offering up his list of the top five players in NBA history.
Stephen Curry’s top five basketball players: MJ, Wilt, LeBron, Shaq & Magic. pic.twitter.com/xayjEUNgUr
— Logan Murdock (@loganmmurdock) April 2, 2019
https://twitter.com/MarcJSpearsESPN/status/1112907337235218432
There weren’t many surprises here, particularly in that Curry made sure to name Michael Jordan and LeBron James. In 2019, any list of the five best players in league history has to include that particular pairing (for fear of public flogging) and the inclusion of Wilt Chamberlain and Magic Johnson certainly isn’t too far out of the mainstream for Curry.
If there was a mild reach on Curry’s list, it was probably the presence of Shaquille O’Neal, if only because luminaries like Bill Russell, Larry Bird and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar didn’t make the cut. Without getting bogged down in the minutiae of a list such as this, Shaq had the dominance and peak to mentioned alongside the game’s best but, in general, most rankings would place The Big Aristotle behind Russell, Abdul-Jabbar and/or Hakeem Olajuwon when listing big men.
To be fair to Curry, this can be a difficult exercise if one isn’t prepared and, in the video above, it doesn’t necessarily feel as if he spent a ton of time considering all of the angles. Finally, Curry was born in 1988 and, while his father did play in the NBA, it isn’t as if he would have a built-in working knowledge of legends dating back to the days of Russell and Chamberlain.
More than anything, this is just an example of a (very) famous basketball player ranking other (very) famous basketball players and, well, that is always something that feeds conversation.
