Two weeks ago, the Baseball Hall of Fame
inducted four players into Cooperstown, which got me thinking:
Who are the NBA equivalents of these baseball greats?
This is the sort of question you come up with in the summer months while you're searching for ways to scratch the NBA itch. For me, it wasn't totally random. As a student of sabermetrics coming out of college in 2008, I broke into the sports industry by breaking down the numbers of baseball. In 2009, I switched over to the NBA in which the line of statistical analysts was far shorter. If you could call it a line at all.
As a kid, I grew up watching
Randy Johnson,
Pedro Martinez,
John Smoltz and
Craig Biggio, the museum's four most recent call-ups. This round hit particularly close to home. I'm a Red Sox fan who grew up outside of New York City. Martinez was and still is a hero of mine, a leader of the 2004 Red Sox squad that finally won it all and brought my Boston-bred father to tears.
In the spirit of August NBA writing, let's bridge baseball and basketball to identify the cross-sport comps of this year's Hall of Fame inductees. To be clear, this doesn't exactly follow a scientific method, but rest assured I did loads of research to pick each of my favorite NBA comps. Indeed, statistical accomplishments weighed heavily as well as their more qualitative characteristics.
But this is more art than science. Disagree? Good. This is supposed to be fun.
Let's get to it.
[h2]The NBA's Randy Johnson: Shaquille O'Neal[/h2]
I almost went with monster-lefty
David Robinson or
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar(another freakishly tall iron man), but here's why Shaq is the NBA's Randy Johnson.
1. Sheer size
Duh. As far as human beings go, O'Neal and Johnson checked in as physical outliers. Shaq stood 7-foot-1 and weighed in well more than 300 pounds (probably closer to 350 at times), but moved around the court like a springy forward in his prime. In a sport of giants, no one could hang with him.
On the mound, Johnson made opposing hitters look like Little Leaguers. Standing at 6-10, Johnson often had a full foot on his opponents who trembled in the batter's box. Johnson's sweeping left hand seemed to cross home plate as he flung his delivery, leaving hitters flailing like a blindfolded child swinging at a piñata. There's a reason they were called The Big Aristotle and The Big Unit.
2. Dominance quantified: strikeouts and dunks
What made O'Neal and Johnson so unique isn't that they were enormous but that they both successfully leveraged their size to complete physical dominance. It took Johnson a while before he honed in his unhittable fastball and slider combination, but he finished his career with the second-most strikeouts in MLB history (4,875) and the highest strikeout-per-nine-inning ratio (10.61). In 2001, the season in which Johnson won the World Series with the
Arizona Diamondbacks, he struck out 372 batters, a total that hadn't been reached in more than 30 years.
O'Neal did the NBA equivalent: he dunked all over everybody and everything. Dunks have been tracked officially only since 1997, which leaves out Shaq's first four seasons. But even still, he registered 2,665 dunks since 1997, which is about 500 dunks more than the next most-proliferous dunker on record (
Dwight Howard's 2,14
. In fact, during the three-peat seasons with the Lakers between 2000 and 2002, Shaq dunked 746 times; no one else had more than 400. Johnson and Shaq dominated at the same time.
3. Starred for multiple teams over long careers
Big uniforms, big personalities. Johnson and O'Neal moved around a bunch in their sport. Johnson played for six teams over his 22-year career, earning Cy Young awards in both the American League (
Seattle Mariners) and National League (
Arizona Diamondbacks). Unlike Smoltz, there's some debate over which hat Johnson should have worn in the Hall of Fame (he ended up wearing a snake over the nautical compass).
After being drafted No. 1 overall by Orlando, Shaq experienced similar changes of scenery over his 18-year career. He won three consecutive titles in LakerLand before taking his talents to Miami, where he won his fourth and final ring. O'Neal spent a season and a half in Phoenix, which is probably the equivalent of Johnson's pitstop with the
Houston Astros for a summer. Like Johnson with
Curt Schilling, Shaq won the big one as part of a Big Two (
Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles and
Dwyane Wade in Miami).