Let’s talk about the phrase “generational talent,” which sometimes feels a little bit like the basketball version of crying wolf.
It seems as if we hear the phrase every year around this time, even when that isn’t the case, and even when the list of No. 1 overall picks through history is littered with players such as Anthony Bennett, Andrea Bargnani and Michael Olowokandi.
Given hindsight, we can judge that Kevin Durant was the truly generational talent in the 2007 draft. At the time, though, it would’ve been tough to argue that — given the Portland Trail Blazers, who held the top pick, didn’t use it to select him.
This time around, everyone seems to agree the label should be attached to Victor Wembanyama. There is approximately zero suspense to whether Wembanyama will go to the Spurs with the top pick in Thursday’s NBA Draft, and hasn’t been since, generously, October, when he dominated two exhibition games in Vegas and prompted LeBron James and Stephen Curry to call him, respectively, “an alien” and a “2K create-a-player.”
Wembanyama appears to be the surest of sure things to enter the draft since James in 2003, if not even further back than that. So, just for fun, let’s take a tour through the generational talents of the past and see how they worked out.
Our biggest rule here: We’re talking about how players were perceived at the time, not how we think of them now. So Michael Jordan, the third overall pick in 1984, isn’t making the list. To be considered a generational talent, you need to have been the No. 1 pick.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (1969)
The NBA’s all-time leading scorer until James passed him this season. A 19-time All-Star, six-time champion and six-time MVP who had one of the most uniquely unstoppable shots in NBA history and is still arguably the greatest center in league history. Generational still applies in every sense of the word — there has never been another player like him and probably never will be. Abdul-Jabbar turned out to be everything people thought he could become while he was setting records at UCLA and more.
Bill Walton (1977)
Walton is a Hall of Famer and former MVP, but due to chronic foot injuries that caused repeated, major setbacks to his career, he goes into the “What could have been” category. The 1976-77 Blazers, for whom Walton played center and won the Finals MVP, was one of the best pre-3-point-line teams in league history. They were a title favorite before Walton’s injury the next season — which limited him to just two games in a first-round loss to the SuperSonics.
After accusing the Blazers of unethically and incompetently treating his injury, Walton sat out the next season before signing with the Clippers and playing just 14 games in 1979-80. Then he got hurt again and missed the next two seasons. He recovered to become a key bench player for the 1986 Celtics in their championship run, but that was a prelude to his playing career ending the next season.
Magic Johnson (1979)
Just as important as his myriad achievements with the Lakers, Johnson helped usher in a new era of popularity for the NBA in which Finals games were no longer on tape delay, and he and Larry Bird became the faces of the league. There’s no question whether Johnson ended up being a generational player — he’s still widely considered the best point guard of all time as well as the best passer ever and a wholly unique player thanks to his 6-foot-9 stature.
Hakeem Olajuwon (1984)
It says a lot about Olajuwon that, in a draft that also included Michael Jordan, you can still make a strong case to attach the word “generational” to Hakeem. His arc from Lagos, Nigeria, to the NBA is probably the most unique in history among Hall of Famers, and his bag of post moves is without any doubt the best in the history of the sport. Add in the two championships to which he led the Rockets (both when Jordan didn’t play the full season), an MVP and 12 All-NBA nods and the label still holds up.
Patrick Ewing (1985)
In hindsight, Ewing is more like a generational Knick than a generational player. There’s no question he was the right pick at No. 1 in a draft in which Wayman Tisdale, Benoit Benjamin, Xavier McDaniel and Jon Koncak rounded out the top five, and Ewing is pretty easily the best Knick in the post-Red Holzman era. But he was never the best center in the league and ended his career as one of the best players to never win a title, failing to beat Jordan in a playoff series and to beat Olajuwon in the Finals when Jordan was off playing baseball. That said, we are ultimately nitpicking the career of a no-doubt Hall of Famer.
David Robinson (1987)
The Spurs have gotten the No. 1 pick three times and come up with three players on this list. Robinson, somehow, is probably the lowest-profile of the three despite being a Hall of Famer and 10-time All-NBA selection. As for the generational label, it’s a judgment call whether it still applies to Robinson in hindsight. He won the MVP once as well as two championships, but both titles came when Tim Duncan had supplanted him as the Spurs’ best player, and Robinson was never the clear best center in the league at any point in his career. Regardless, being a surefire Hall of Famer is far from the worst outcome.
Shaquille O’Neal (1992)
Without a doubt, O’Neal lived up to the generational label. The Hall of Famer had one of the best individual seasons in history on his way to winning the 2000 MVP award, and had one of the most dominant runs of all time throughout the Lakers’ three-peat from 2000-02. Even among the luminaries on this list, O’Neal is one of the easiest calls — there’s really no discussion as to whether he exceeded whatever expectations accompanied his draft status.
Tim Duncan (1997)
Ditto for Duncan, who won five championships over a 15-year span and had one of the most staggering runs of longevity this side of Abdul-Jabbar. He’s also one of 15 players ever to win multiple MVP awards, and has three Finals MVPs — including one of the most underrated series in history when he averaged 24 and 17 against the Nets in 2003 with 20-20-10 in the closeout Game 6. It’s Duncan’s lack of individuality, though, and the way he helped turn the Spurs into serial winners that stands out more so than any one achievement, both counting as historically unique.
Yao Ming (2002)
With a relatively short eight-year career and no individual honors to his name, Yao was generational more in the commercial sense — helping make the NBA’s popularity in China skyrocket to a level that still has massive impact today — than in the on-court sense. It’s arguable whether he ended up being the best player in a not-great 2002 draft, though five All-NBA appearances over an eight-year career isn’t at all shabby and he did end up in the Hall of Fame, That, however, had more to do with his international body of work than his career with the Rockets.
LeBron James (2003)
Whatever happened to that guy? We hear he’s popular in Cleveland.
Anthony Davis (2012)
Davis turned into a great player, but a generational one? That’s a little bit tougher to judge. He’s consistently dealt with injuries and, outside of the 2020 bubble run with the Lakers, it’s hard to point to a time when he’s fully lived up to his potential as a player.
Four All-NBA appearances over an 11-year career point to his ability, but he’s more than talented enough to make it every year. Maybe we’re being overly harsh here — again, Davis is a fantastic player without whom the Lakers wouldn’t have won the 2020 title. But generational feels a step too far.
Ben Simmons (2016)
If you’re looking for the point when the word “generational” lost its cachet, you could do worse than the 2016 draft, when Ben Simmons and Brandon Ingram were both hyped as game-changing talents who became … let’s be generous here and say decent NBA players.
That is particularly kind to Simmons, probably the only player on this list who we can unequivocally describe as a bust. Even with a few good years in Philadelphia, Simmons never has gotten on top of shooting issues that were evident in his game at LSU, and over the past few years, injuries and off-court distractions have dominated the discourse around a player who was once promising.
Zion Williamson (2019)
The hype cycle around Williamson while he was at Duke might rival the current discourse around Wembanyama. Every game was an event, and there was worry about accommodating the media demand during the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament when the Blue Devils played in Columbia, S.C, at the relatively small Colonial Life Arena.
Fast forward to now, and Williamson has played just 114 games over four seasons, hampered by injuries and fitness issues, while dealing with a slew of recent headlines around what seems to be an extremely messy sex life. It’s too early to call him a bust, and there have been flashes of potential when Williamson has actually been on the court — he’s averaged over 25 points as an NBA player — but it seems fair to say the situation doesn’t look great.
Victor Wembanyama (2023)
The trend here is that the hype has exceeded the output over the past 15 or so years. Prior to that, players regularly lived up to it. (It’s more than possible, however, that recency bias is a large reason for that.) Wembanyama, though, feels as much like a lock to be a superstar as any player in recent memory — a ball-handling, 7-foot-4 menace whose Wikipedia entry already includes the phrase “one of the greatest basketball players of his generation.”
Whether that holds up is something we’ll only learn in time.
Today’s back page
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A young roster, with a veteran narrative
The headlines surrounding the USWNT’s roster announcement on Wednesday almost universally centered on the youth of Vlatko Andonovski’s squad.
Fourteen players were selected for their first World Cup, three likely starters are under 25 and old mainstays Becky Sauerbrunn, Mallory Swanson and Sam Mewis are out with injuries. Sports Illustrated even ran a cover story last week about all the new faces on the squad.
Once the World Cup begins, though, with group-stage matches against Vietnam, the Netherlands and Portugal, the quest for an unprecedented third straight championship will center around the same faces who anchored title runs in 2015 and ’19.
It would be wrong to say the group attempting to become three-time champs — Megan Rapinoe, Alex Morgan, Kelley O’Hara, Alyssa Naeher and Julie Ertz — is going for immortality because they’ve already done that. This is for something greater, something completely unprecedented in the history of the sport.
Rapinoe and Morgan, in particular, are aiming to be considered among the best female athletes ever. Certainly a third straight World Cup combined with the way they’ve helped grow the game would put them right in the conversation along with Serena Williams, Simone Biles and Diana Taurasi, if they aren’t already there.
Maybe a more appropriate conversation would be where they place among the best American athletes ever, a discussion that must be had if the United States adds a fifth World Cup to its ledger two months from now.
Henrik to the Hall
It is a gift to Rangers fans that Henrik Lundqvist’s election to the Hall of Fame comes not decades after his playing career, but at the first available opportunity, when his greatness is still fresh in the minds of everyone who saw him.
For 15 seasons, Lundqvist was a constant. Always there. Always cool. Always hauling the Rangers into relevance.
Between a forced retirement due to heart issues, his number retirement in Jan. 2022 and now this, it does feel a little as though Lundqvist-related hagiography is becoming well-plowed ground with alarming speed.
But to everyone who bore witness to his career, that is only deserved.
