Top 100 NBA Players: #10

Jerry West

(Kalb: #12, Simmons: #8, BBR: #16)

What better way to kick off the top 10 than with the player that the NBA chose to model its logo after? Jerry West was one of those rare players who would have been great in any era, and may have been remembered even more fondly if his career had come just a decade later.

Among the top 10 players of all time, West has fewer championships than 8 of the others. But if you examine his career closely, you'll see that he was one of the greatest winners of all time, just not a perennial champion. He played a total of 14 seasons in the NBA, and 9 of those seasons ended in the NBA Finals. 6 times those losses came to Bill Russell's Boston Celtics, with West as Elgin Baylor's sidekick during the first three losses and as the Lakers star during the next three losses. West's dominance continued after the end of the Celtics dynasty, and the Lakers made three more trips to the Finals in the 1970's, facing the New York Knicks each time, with the Lakers finally winning a title in 1972. Wilt Chamberlain was named the MVP of that Finals, but West was the Lakers' best player and should have been given the award. Here is a comparison of their stats from that season's playoffs:

West - 22.9 pts, 4.9 reb, 8.9 ast, .376 FG%, .830 FT%
Chamberlain - 14.7 pts, 21.0 reb, 3.3 ast, .563 FG%, .492 FT%

Wilt's 21 rebounds per game were probably what caught the voters' attention, but West either scored or assisted on over 40 points per game for the Lakers, nearly double Chamberlain's average. West had won a Finals MVP before, so I guess it evened things out, but it's pretty impressive to note that when West won the Finals MVP in 1969, he was the only player in history to win the award despite playing for the losing team. He earned it with one of the greatest Finals performances of all time, which included 53 points in Game 1 and a triple-double of 42 points, 13 rebounds, and 12 assists in Game 7, which the Lakers lost by 2.

West also holds the distinction of posting the highest scoring average over the course of a playoff series, and is the only player in the top 5 besides Michael Jordan. In the 1965 Western Conference Finals, West averaged 46.3 points per game, a record which many have approached but none have surpassed in the last 47 years. His scoring average for the entire playoffs was 40.6, which is still the highest in history.

It was unfortunate for West to have played in the 1960's more multiple reasons. One obvious one was the dominance of the Celtics during that period, but there are a couple of other reasons as well. One is that steals were not recorded until West's final season, in which he only played 31 games due to a career-ending injury. In that short span, he averaged 2.6 steals per game, at the tail end of his career. He would probably have been remembered as the greatest defensive guard in NBA history if they had just kept track of them, but his opponents still remember how tough he was on both ends of the floor.

The other thing that would have helped West if he had played in a later era was the three-point line. West was well-known for his shooting range, and one of his most famous moments involved a very long shot. In Game 3 of the 1970 NBA Finals, New York took a 2-point lead with just seconds remaining, and since the Lakers were out of timeouts, West took the inbound pass and heaved a shot from 60 feet that was right on target, tying the game (since there was no three-point line) and keeping the Lakers alive. Because of that and several other big moments near the end of games, West earned the nickname "Mr. Clutch."

West was the best player on 6 NBA Finals teams, a feat that only three other players can boast of. Those players are Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, and Bill Russell, and though those players seemed to win a lot more often, you cannot take away West's greatness from the lack of rings on his fingers. It has been said that the only thing lacking in his game was the ability to play above the rim, but West would still be recognized as a star in today's NBA.

The career paths of West and Olajuwon look pretty similar, with West starting out a little stronger, and Olajuwon coming on a little later in his career. Each was among the greatest defensive players ever at his respective position, and each led his team to a championship late in his career. While Hakeem was able to complete the trick twice, his overall Finals record of 2-1 still doesn't quite compare to West's, even though the Lakers great ended up at 1-8 in the title series, because he was there three times as often as Olajuwon.