Who is the best basketball player of all time? The best quarterback? The best athlete?
These questions are some of the most heavily debated in sports. This year, ALLCITY set out to answer them.
Over the course of 10 days, we conducted polling of Diehard sports fans across the country on a number of different categories. The vote garnered 535 responses.
Every day this week, we’ll reveal top-five lists in the following categories:
- Monday: The best basketball player of all time
- Tuesday: The best quarterback to ever take the field
- Wednesday: The best overall athlete ever
- Thursday: The biggest, baddest villains in Arizona sports history
- Friday: The best uniforms ever worn by an Arizona team
We’ll also reveal how PHNX Diehards and staff voted on these categories and how they differ from the national results. For transparency, our methodology is listed at the end of this article.
So is the G.O.A.T. Debate officially settled? You be the judge.
Best basketball player of all time
The G.O.A.T. of basketball debate is seemingly settled…
Michael Jordan took the title in our vote by a pretty wide margin. He received 325 first-place votes while LeBron James earned just 67. At spots three and four, Kobe Bryant and Wilt Chamberlin were separated by just 0.2% of the point share, while Kareem Abdul-Jabbar rounded out the top five.
CHGO Diehards made up 37% of the entire voting pool, which could have swayed the result in Jordan’s favor. Did the voters get it right?
PHNX Diehard results
Diehards in Arizona saw the vote a bit differently. These were the results:
- Steve Nash
- Michael Jordan
- Charles Barkley
- Devin Booker
- LeBron James
Jordan had the most first-place votes, but Nash earned a higher point share which placed him in first. Voters listed 47 different names, but the top-five rounded out in the above list. Is there some Southwest Bias at play there?
PHNX Staff results
The PHNX staff’s votes aligned with the national Diehard vote a little bit more than the local one. Here are the results:
- Michael Jordan
- LeBron James
- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
- Bill Russell
- Magic Johnson
Jordan took home six first-place votes while James had five, a bit more neck-and-neck than the national ranking. The staff listed 22 different names overall.
Leah Merrall’s take: I had Diana Taurasi on my top-five list. Not only is she widely regarded as the best WNBA player of all time, she’s one of the best basketball players of all time, period. She’s a three-time WNBA champion, two-time Finals MVP, 11-time WNBA All-Star, five-time WNBA scoring champion, and the all-time WNBA leading scorer, to list just a few of her accolades. Yes, she’s a Phoenix legend who just last Sunday had her number added to the Mercury Ring of Honor, but Taurasi’s achievements in basketball transcend her team and her league. She’s not only the G.O.A.T. in the WNBA – she deserves to be on the top-five list of best basketball players of all time.
Methodology and quality controls
- Rankings used a 5–1 points system: five points for first place through one point for fifth place.
- Spelling, capitalization, obvious shorthand, and name variants were normalized before scoring.
- Team, color, era, alternate, and home/away uniform descriptions were consolidated into consistent market-specific labels.
- When the same final answer appeared more than once within one ranked question, it counted once at its highest placement; lower repeats were discarded.
- In a published uniform Top 5, a general team-only bucket was omitted when a specific uniform for that same team was also listed. If a general bucket stood alone, it displayed as the team name without “Unspecified.”
- Tied point totals share the same numerical rank. Display order then uses first-place votes, ballot mentions, and alphabetical order.
- ALLCITY point totals reconcile exactly to the sum of the five markets, with zero formula errors in the final workbook.
Agree with the results? Disagree? Let us know on X, Instagram, or Facebook @PHNX_Sports.