Who will be the next NBA star to play their entire career with one team?

Steph Curry might be the latest NBA great to spend his whole career with one team but he won’t be the last. Here are the top five candidates to pull it off.

There are few things in life as quietly satisfying as talking about the good old days.

It’s comfort food for the soul. The more unreliable a narrator you are, the more fun it gets, all in the spirit of reinforcing the tropes and beliefs that serve as our moral and emotional bedrock. You can also drink while doing it, which is a fun bonus.

I thought of my own personal good old days recently while listening to Bill Simmons’ new podcast, the Book of Basketball 2.0. The episode was about Steph Curry, who Bill described as the latest and potentially last player in the lineage of greats who will spend their entire career with one team.

(The latter part isn’t yet a certainty, but it might as well be. Curry isn’t going anywhere.)

It brought me back to when I first began watching the NBA in the early 1990s. I thought about how unlike today, you used to associate players with teams, not brands unto themselves. I reminisced. Maybe even shed a little tear.

I then quickly caught myself. Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Hakeem Olajuwon, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone, Clyde Drexler, Dominique Wilkins, Scottie Pippen…all of them spent time in weird, unfamiliar duds at some point, even if just briefly.

So when we talk about how Curry is a final throwback to the way things used to be, it’s not only a fallacy, but it presupposes something else that isn’t at all likely to be true: that he’s the last of his kind.

While Curry is no doubt a rarity, in the same mold as Reggie Miller and John Stockton and David Robinson and more recently Timmy, Kobe and Dirk, there will be other all-time greats there to take up this mantle.

The challenge is in figuring out not only who will stay with one team for their entire career, but who will reach the heights of immortality in the process. It’s a short list of obvious candidates.

Following the Russ trade and Dirk’s retirement, Curry has the most All-Star game appearances — just six — among active players who have spent their career with one team. Only five other active players have more than two (we’ll get to who they are in a bit), so clearly this is going to involve a bit of projecting.

Talk about an exercise in futility. Even if you think someone has the type of loyalty that evaded this summer’s free-agent class, who’s to say they won’t pull a Karl Malone and go ring-chasing late in their career? In terms of younger players, we also have to consider whether a seemingly sure-fire Hall of Fame career might be derailed by injuries (I’ll always love you, Penny Hardaway) ineffectiveness (ditto Stephon Marbury) or even an ill-timed lockout (hi there, Shawn Kemp).

With that as the backdrop, let’s take a stab at a top-five current (or future) greats who are most likely to spend their entire careers with one team. First, though, a few who just missed the cut: