First off, here's the ranking followed by number of GOAT Shares for that player:
Michael Jordan - 14.1
Bill Russell - 13.4
LeBron James - 12.8
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - 9.2
Magic Johnson - 8.1
Larry Bird - 7.6
Shaquille O'Neal - 7.4
Tim Duncan - 7.3
Wilt Chamberlain - 6.9
Kobe Bryant - 6.1
That's the top 10, here's the next 5:
Kevin Durant - 5.2
Hakeem Olajuwon - 4.6
Karl Malone - 4.3
Moses Malone - 3.8
Giannis - 3.8 (as of end of '22 regular season)
So, what are "GOAT Shares"? It's my semi-arbitrary name for a number with two components: (1)
Career NBA MVP Award Shares and (2) Number of
NBA Finals MVPs won.
I modified this basic concept in the following two ways: (1) I made an effort to "normalize" pre-1980s MVP Shares to post-1980 points counting, assigning a .8 for 1st place finishes, .6 for 2nd place finishes, .4 for 3rd place finishes, etc. for Russell, Wilt, and Kareem. This moves these players' actual MVP shares to "normalized" MVP shares as follows: from 4.7 to 6.4 for Russell, from 4.1 to 4.9 for Wilt, and from 6.1 to 7.2 from Kareem. The other modification is: (2) Pre-1969 NBA Finals MVPs are estimates, such that Russell has 7 and Wilt has a total of 2 ('72 actual, '67 estimated). (Also, for Giannis, I am using a probably conservative estimate of .5 Award Shares for the official '22 MVP voting.)
These totals above do not adjust for what competition for Award Share a given player had for his prime MVP-contending seasons, and so it probably overstates Kareem's 1st component considerably given that he had no Wilt- or Russell-level player to take a lot of MVP share from him as they did with one another. Or how Larry's MVP seasons were before Jordan emerged whereas Magic had to compete against prime MJ and prime Larry in '87 and '88. I don't know how to properly adjust for that issue at this point.
Breaking down by 20-year era, the rankings are as follows:
'60-79:
Russell - 13.4
Kareem - 9.2
Wilt - 6.9
'80-99:
MJ - 14.1
Magic - 8.1
Larry - 7.6
Hakeem - 4.6
Karl - 4.3
Moses - 3.8
'00-19:
LeBron - 12.8
Shaq - 7.4
Tim - 7.3
Kobe - 6.2
KD - 5.2
I guess you could also refer to this as a player's GOAT Number. I might also make adjustments for GOAT Number per game, since MJ's number is limited by a couple or few points just because of less playing time and not because of not being that much more dominant. It's not hard to imagine a Jordan playing a fuller career ending up with 10 Award Shares and 1 or 2 more Finals MVPs which would push his GOAT Number past 18, etc. etc
