As part of the rollout of our new historical numbers and as a result of analyzing Robert Horry's Hall of Fame (HOF) candidacy, I took the time to go through and look at every player in NBA history. After that, it was only natural that I would put together my own hypothetical Hall of Fame ballot.

Let's go over some ground rules. I’ll be basing my ballot on the Naismith Hall of Fame rules. I want to:

• Generate a pool of candidates.
• Identify the players I would recommend putting on the ballot.
• Finally, I'm looking to identify all the candidates that would get my vote (if I had one).

Because of limitations with the old boxscores, we only have wins produced data from 1973-74 on. That means that I consider players who played the bulk of their career before the 1973-74 season to be outside the scope of this analysis. Perhaps I’ll look at these older players in a subsequent post (hint hint). But for our modern era players I will be using a rigorous statistical approach. I prepared a Hall of Fame score by looking at both totals and per minute numbers. 

The Cream of the Crop

Let's get straight to the findings shall we? Here are the players at the top of my list:

Player	Career Score	Prime Score	Total Score
John Stockton	91.5	41.6	133.1
Charles Barkley	79.6	47.1	126.7
Magic Johnson	80.1	44.9	125.1
Dennis Rodman	70.8	43.2	114.1
David Robinson	60.7	39.3	100.0
Michael Jordan	56.9	40.2	97.1
Larry Bird	51.5	34.6	86.1
Clyde Drexler	52.7	30.1	82.8
Moses Malone	52.4	28.5	80.9
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar	43.2	32.6	75.8

The Nitty Gritty

I don't play around when it comes to separating the wheat from the chaff. Here are the standards I applied for the above scores:

• Only considered seasons where the player played the equivalent of 1000 minutes for 82 games. This means 610 minutes for the 98-99 lockout season and 805 minutes for the 11-12 lockout season.
• Calculated the average and standard deviation of Wins Produced and Wins Produced per 48 (WP48) for all qualifying seasons. Chose to use Wins and WP48 to provide a measure of both total production and skill. The average is 4.6 wins with a standard deviation of 4.3 wins and 0.103 WP48 average with 0.083 standard deviation.
• Identified The Brocato Prime: i.e. the player's six best seasons.
• Normalized the Wins Produced and WP48 for each qualifying season. Normalization is taking a number, subtracting out the population average, and then dividing the result by the population standard deviation. I did this to put every season on the same scale.As an example, Dennis Rodman's ridiculous 1991-1992 campaign (29.8 wins and 0.433 WP48) gets him a normalized value of 5.9 standard deviations above the mean for wins and 4.0 standard deviations above the mean for WP48.
• And now we have the Player Hall of Fame Score! It's calculated as follows (with explanations for each term in parentheses)
  • (Career and Longevity)
    Sum of all qualifying normalized values for Wins +
  • (Consistency)
    Sum of all qualifying normalized values for Wins per 48 +
  • (Apex Greatness)
    Sum of all qualifying normalized values for Wins for Brocato Prime seasons +
  • (Apex Excellence)
    Sum of all qualifying normalized values for Wins per 48 for Brocato Prime seasons

The Final Word

Of course, every player on this list is in the Hall of Fame already, which means we'll have to dig deeper for more players (hint, hint). But we have an edge: not only do we have a standard to use to admit players into the Hall, but we also have the details for you to argue with. We'll be rolling out more Hall of Fame numbers as we go, and look forward to many more arguments. Of course, it will be tough to find anyone who disagrees with those top ten names.