Top 100 NBA Players: #60

John Stockton

(Kalb: #27, Simmons: #25, BBR: #14)

I realize that many may call it blasphemy to put Stockton this low in the all-time rankings, especially with all of the individual achievements in his career, and it hurts me to put him here too, because I have the utmost respect for him as a player and as a human being, but the fact is that he wasn't as good as many have made him out to be.

A few people will try to claim that his assist record should be discounted because assists were easier to get in his era than they were earlier days of the league, and will often compare his numbers to those of Bob Cousy to make their point, but the truth is that the average number of assists per game changed very little from 1951 through today. Assists did reach their peak in the mid-1980's, but the difference wasn't that huge. In 1956, when Cousy led the league with 8.9 assists per game, the average team got 24.3 per game, and when Stockton led the league with 14.2 assists per game in 1991, the team average leaguewide was 24.7. The only time in which assists were truly hard to get was the first four seasons of the NBA, in which the average for a team was still in the single digits.

The obvious question here is, "What caused the difference between Cousy and Stockton if assists were just as easy to get back then?" The real difference is specialization. Before the 1980's, most teams did not differentiate a point guard from a shooting guard. Whichever one got the ball took it up the court, and was more likely to record an assist. That is a small part of the reason that Stockton is ranked this low, but only a part.

Let's look for a moment at Stockton's other major achievement, which is his all-time record for steals. This one is especially misleading, because steals, unlike assists, have only been recorded for the past 38 years, meaning that there is no way to know whether he really has the most overall steals. If Jordan hadn't retired for five seasons in the prime of his career, he could easily have passed Stockton here. This record was also helped by the fact that he has played in the third-most games all-time. He was a good defensive player and led the league in steals twice, but this record doesn't help his all-time standing quite as much.

Another thing holding Stockton back was the lack of postseason success. He played in two NBA Finals late in his career, and he was still the #2 player on the Jazz, just as he had been for over a decade, but that seems to eclipse his previous playoff failings in the eyes of many. The truth is that in his 19 seasons, the Jazz made the playoffs every single season, but lost in the first round 9 times, and in the second round 5 more times. That leaves 3 Western Conference Finals seasons and the two trips to the Finals, where they lost to Michael Jordan and the Bulls. In 1996, he was not as good as Jeff Hornacek, which I detailed in my article on his back at #95, and he was still Malone's sidekick on those other teams. How can someone be considered one of the greatest of all time if he was never the best player on his own team?

To recap, I want to emphasize that I love John Stockton. I loved the way he played, and especially the way he showed up every night. In 17 different seasons he never missed a single game. He played his entire career with one team, showing great loyalty to the Utah team that took a chance on the small-school boy. The Jazz made the playoffs every single season that he was on the roster. I just can't overlook the fact that he wasn't ever a superstar. He only ranked among the top 15 players in the league once, and was never his team's best player. He rarely saw playoff success, and the majority of it came after he had started to decline as a player. He was very good at the things he was supposed to do, and not so great at the things he wasn't expected to do. Overall, he exceeded a lot of expectations, but he is not one of the top 50 players of all time. Sorry.

Stockton and Parish had two of the longest careers of anybody in NBA history, and both were able to maintain a relatively even level of play for a long period of time. Parish had more playoff success, but Stockton was a bigger reason for his team's overall success. What this one really came down to was that Stockton became a relevant player a year earlier in his career than Parish did, and started his decline at the same point.