Draymond Green makes questionable inclusion in his top-5 players all-time

Draymond Green shared his top-5 players of all time and filled the final spot with a questionable choice for a traditional big man.

Almost every living, noteworthy NBA player, past or present, has been asked in one interview or another to list their top 5 players of all time. This, of course, feeds a cottage industry dissecting their choices and highlighting their blindspots and biases.

All of that is to say, it’s a subjective question and there aren’t really any wrong answers. Still, I’m going to pick some nits with the list Draymond Green recently shared in a new video.

Who did Draymond Green choose for his 5 greatest players of all time?

On a new episode of his UNINTERRUPTED video series, Throwing Bones, Draymond sat down with Juan Toscano-Anderson and actor Rome Flynn for a game of dominoes. During the conversation, Draymond named his top five — LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Stephen Curry and Shaquille O’Neal.

It’s a fairly conventional list but I’d call the inclusion of Shaq a bit questionable. He’s certainly an all-time great but if you need a traditional big man on your list, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar won more titles and MVPs, and finished his career with more points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks.

Even if Draymond felt like he wanted to include a player from the modern era, what about Tim Duncan? He also finished his career with more titles, MVPs, rebounds, steals, blocks and assists and only trailed Shaq about by 2000 total points on the career scoring leaderboard. Duncan also played Shaq to an even 15-15 record in the postseason but averaged more points, rebounds, assists and steals per game in those matchups than Shaq.

Again, Draymond Green isn’t wrong to have Shaq in his top-5. But that doesn’t mean he’s right either.