What is the argument against Larry Bird being ranked among the best 10 NBA players of all time, aside from the briefness of his career?

What is the argument against Larry Bird being ranked among the best 10 NBA players of all time, aside from the briefness of his career?

To pick ten better players would be the case against him. Doing that is really difficult.

These are the guys who are easily debatable as superior to Bird.

LeBron James and Michael Jordan James
Kareem Abdul-Jabar
Wilt Chamberlain
Russell, Bill
There are some very simple arguments that can be made for each of the five, but I’m not going to try to prove that any of them is superior.

This implies that I have five more names to come up with. Most likely, they must originate from this list.

Magic Johnson
Robertson Oscar
Tim Duncan
Olajuwon Hakeem
Shaquille O’Neal
Kevin Durant
Curry Steph
Bryant, Kobe
Whether I would rank any of those men higher than Bird is debatable. Without a doubt, I couldn’t come up with five to present.

of him. The issue is that there isn’t a reliable set of priorities that permits five. There are a few players who could outscore Bird if scoring is your top priority, but not five.

There are very few if play-making is important to you.

Even if defense is important to you, there aren’t many five on this list, and defense was Bird’s worst suit. Bird remained superior than Magic, Steph, and Durant, and more so than many now believe. I’ve never watched Oscar play, so all I can say about his defense is that defensive win shares, for example, don’t usually have him ranked higher than Bird. Like Bird, Shaq’s finest defense was limited to his earlier years, but the others were undoubtedly superior.

You may not find five, if any, intangibles that you value, such as competitiveness, leadership, and performance under pressure.

As a ring counter, are you? There aren’t five.

Making the argument for each player individually would be the only way to reach number five without contradicting yourself. For instance, Magic was maybe the greatest team captain in history as well as a more adept creator and offensive player than Bird. However, Bird was a superior defender and scorer. Therefore, even though Kobe scored more points and (some argue) played better defense, if you rank Magic above Bird, you shouldn’t rank Kobe above him as well because Bird was a better creator, a more diverse offensive player, and a better team leader.

It is really difficult, no matter how you slice it, to consistently argue that any group of five of these players was superior to Bird in light of these kinds of discrepancies.

I doubt you could create a criterion that included a weighted average of all the pertinent factors and would not have placed Bird in the top ten, no matter how the weights were chosen, since Bird was so excellent in every facet of the game. For many of the other guys who are nearly unanimously regarded as being in the top ten, it isn’t the case. Given that none of them won more than two titles, Durant, Wilt, Hakeem, and the Big O may be deemed too weak in the category of team success. Duncan and Russell didn’t score high enough. Steph isn’t good enough in passing, rebounding, or playing defense. Shaq lacked offensive adaptability. Kobe lacked both leadership and offensive variety.

Bird was so excellent in every aspect that it is difficult to defend his exclusion.