There are dozens of ways an NBA team can honor a former player. Nowadays it seems as if anyone who wore a jersey for more than a year or two gets a tribute video when they return to their old stomping grounds. Retired jerseys are the standard for team legends, and they come with a permanence that needs to be reserved a select few. After all, you can only theoretically retire so many numbers before running out of available ones.
But there’s a level beyond even jersey retirements, and it’s a rarity: the statue outside of the arena. At present, only 13 of them exist. These monuments are meant for something greater than a team legend. They belong to local icons, players whose relationships with a city transcend the sport and even the bounds of time. The Chicago Bulls will never not be Michael Jordan’s team. It’s fitting that Bulls fans get to see his likeness before every home game.
On Monday, former NBA player Gilbert Arenas made waves when he said that LeBron James should not get a statue in Los Angeles. For reasons I’ll explain shortly, I agree with his position, but the concept got me thinking: who does deserve a statue in the NBA, and where should that statue be?
I enter this exercise with two hard-and-fast rules. First, a championship is a prerequisite for a statue. Part of what a statue should be meant to celebrate is reaching the pinnacle of the sport. Notably, there are four current statue players who do not have championships: John Stockton, Karl Malone, Dominique Wilkins and Elgin Baylor. In our stricter world, they’ll have to settle for retired jerseys.
Second, nobody can have a statue in more than one city. This obviously raises some complications for players who won championships in multiple cities, but statues extend beyond what happens on the court. They should represent a singular bond between a figure and his city that can’t be replicated elsewhere.
So with that in mind, 26 total people — 22 players and four coaches — qualify for immortalization. Of those 26, 10 already have statues. Let’s quickly run through…
..
