Listing the best basketball players based on their accomplishments requires a measurable placed on each accomplishment. The two types of accomplishments in hoops are statistics, and awards.
Stats include per-game numbers like points per game, and career totals like total rebounds. They also include calculated numbers like the PER, or player efficiency ratio.
The awards include thing like an MVP or All-Start game selection. A championship is also an award, although it is obviously a team award.
Awards are things a player can receive multiple times, where stats are put in to a list where a player occupies a position on the list. When assigning a point value to measure stats and awards, the award points can be multiplied by the number of awards to come up with a total, so if I give 4 points for an MVP, a player with 2 MVP awards gets 8 points.
For lists of statistical leaders, I use a declining scale of points. So if I give points to the top ten players on the list of total career points, the first player on the list gets 10 points, the second gets 9 points, and so on. The 10th player on the list would get 1 point.
Championships are a little trickier, since they are held out as very important, but hard to attribute to a single player. To give credit with appropriate balances, I’ve compiled stats on the number of all-NBA first team and All-star players on each championship team. It seems logical that the more All-star teammates you have, the less credit you get for winning a championship. So in calculating the points for a championship, I deduct points for each all-NBA and All-star teammate.
Most of the stats are based on the common ones that have been tracked since the early days. I have also given smaller credits for leaders of late-era stats, even though they are not available to the early-era players. There are a number of compensating factors that I felt justified this, at least for the lower point values I gave them.
One late-era award I wanted to give decent points for is the Finals MVP, which was first awarded in 1969. Given that 10 of the 19 NBA championships prior to that award were won by the Celtics, the only player that misses out significantly is Bill Russel (the other candidates, most notably George Mikan, are far short of the top tier in total career stats). So I included a couple of very legitimate accomplishments that are unique to Mr. Russel, allowing for an open argument about whether those feats are worth more or less points than a Finals MVP. In my default calculation, I’ve given him 3 awards with the same value as Finals MVP awards.