November 21, 2025
By: Kevin
Legacy Score is my attempt to quantify the mark left on professional basketball by players who have played in the BAA, NBA or ABA. In recent years I have become obsessed with determining where the greatest players in NBA history lie and even have a basketball card display dedicated to my personal rankings. This project is an outgrowth of that. While I do not think this system is the definitive rankings of professional basketball rankings I think you will find that it is illuminating and facilitates the discussion of the all time greats.
The impetus for Legacy Score came while I was watching a youtube video discussion between two sports card content creators, Chris Sewall (Baseball Collector Investor Dealer) and Mike of Junk Wax Hero. The father of Sabermetrics, Bill James, posed a system back in the 1980’s of ranking every baseball player who ever played in the major leagues that would go beyond the binary of whether a player is a hall-of-famer or not.
This implicitly makes sense, not every hall-of-fame player is the same. Some are more vital to the story of the game than others. This is a similar concept to Bill Simmons’ Pyramid which he came up with his childhood friend Gus Ramsey and Gus’s dad.
James’ system works in the following way. Divide the entire universe of MLB players into the thirds. The top third moves up a level and then this process is repeated until you are left with the greatest player in the history of Baseball. In the video, Mike (Junk Wax Hero) discusses how baseball writer Joe Posnanski followed this process and narrowed down players until he was left with Willie Mays at the top of his pyramid. Chris and Mike also discussed the idea of coming up with a complex formula that determines whether a player is a hall-of-famer or not. Legacy Score is a version of this for Basketball.
At its core, Legacy Score is not very complex. It assigns numerical values to the performance of players in both the regular and post seasons. There are three components regular season performance, as measured by Win Shares along with awards, and playoff performance measured differently.
It is important to disclose that the point system used by Legacy Score is mostly arbitrary. outside of player win shares but that does not mean that it is random. The starting point is that the most valuable thing a player can do for his legacy is be the best player on a championship winning team. This feat is worth 50 points. The next most valuable thing is winning an MVP award. MVP’s earn 20 points for finishing first team all-league and an additional 20 points for winning MVP for a total of 40 points or 80 percent of the value of being the top player on a championship team.
This funnels on down to other players who either received all-league honors or were important contributors for teams that went on long playoff runs. For more specific details on how Legacy Score is actually calculated please view the about page.
Over time I would like to refine the formula and make it less arbitrary but I also appreciate its current form’s simplicity. One of the first tests when coming up with any system or model is to look at the results to see if they pass the smell test. Does it actually seem valuable on its face? Legacy Score has spit out the following five players as the greatest in NBA history: LeBron James, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Jordan, Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain. That list is inclusive of every player in NBA history that I would entertain as the greatest of all time. I would not necessarily agree with you but I would listen to your argument and could respect your opinion.
On that note, it's important to point out that in its raw form, Legacy Score is a cumulative score which is why it gives the edge to LeBron and Kareem who have had extremely long careers. I have attempted to adjust for this somewhat with peak and weighted scores (detailed on the about section) but those are not the most elegant methods either. I hope to refine those over time. I also will be writing a GOAT case for each of the five aforementioned players in due time, but don’t assume my personal rankings match those of Legacy Score completely.
Most importantly I have had a lot of fun of the last two years developing both Legacy Score and this website and hope that you enjoy it even a little bit as much as I do. Maybe it will even help you win a few arguments!
Thanks for visiting,
Kevin