100 Most Valuable Men's College Basketball Players in VABG 1939 to Now

After playing hundreds of simulated Value Add Basketball games using 300 great college basketball team cards that I researched and calculated myself, this is my updated list of the 100 greatest college basketball players in our game - which includes most players in history.

In addition to overall level and play and impact on the game, we looked at Win Shares per 10 team games played, which allows meaningful comparison across eras with vastly different schedules. About two-thirds of the players on this list have published college Win Share data; for the remaining one-third, I produced estimates using the same Value Add methodology.

To clarify the scale: a player with 4.8 Win Shares per 10 games is worth roughly five wins for every ten games his team plays.

For example, Kansas went 42–8 during Wilt Chamberlain’s tenure. A value of 4.8 WS per 10 games credits Wilt with roughly 24 of those wins, leaving the remaining 18 wins attributable to his teammates, while the team lost eight games overall. This framing makes it possible to compare players fairly across teams, eras, and rule sets. Wilt was clearly the most valuable player to his team, though I rank him third overall.

One caveat on "Most Valuable" vs. "Greatest" (which I originally called this list) is that it is hard to make the list if there were two truly great players on your team because the team likely could have won a lot of games without you. There are two duos on this list - UNC's Michael Jordan and James Worthy and Ohio State's Jerry Lucas and John Havlicek. However, in other cases to site even my alma mater - neither Jimmy Butler or Jae Crowder made the list for the season they played together but when it was just Butler his value went up. The same with Bo Ellis and Butch Lee or with Dean Meminger and Jim Chones. Every university will have similar examples where a tremendously valuable player does not make the top 100 list because they team had another all-time superstar. Also these are only players in the game, and we try to get at least one team per school but also not to have too many teams from any given school so some players were not considered because their team is not among the 300 in the game.

---

Why Anthony Davis Ranks 7th All-Time

The ranking most people will debate is Anthony Davis at No. 7. Based on my Value Add Basketball rankings that were covered in this Sports Illustrated article more than a decade ago, I found that Davis was by far the most valuable college basketball player of the 21st century, based on his performance during Kentucky’s 2012 national championship season—ironically, I was in attendance at the only game that team lost (at Indiana).

If players throughout history had competed under the same rules and conditions, I don’t believe there would be any debate that Anthony Davis belongs among the ten greatest college players of all time.

The primary reason Davis is often ranked below many 20th-century stars is structural, not performance-based. Davis played in the one-and-done era, meaning his entire college résumé consists of his freshman season. In contrast, during most of the 20th century, elite players were not allowed to play varsity basketball as freshmen, meaning their first college action came as sophomores—after a full year of development.

The Value Add Basketball research mentioned above shows that MOST CAREER improvement in a player’s career almost always occurs between the freshman and sophomore seasons.

In other words:

• If all great players in history had been limited to only their freshman seasons, Anthony Davis would clearly rank among the top 10 college players ever.

• Conversely, if Davis had been required to sit out as a freshman and then played sophomore and junior seasons at Kentucky, as most historical greats did, he almost certainly would have built a résumé universally recognized as top-10 all-time.

Thus, when all players are evaluated under equal conditions, Anthony Davis emerges as one of the greatest 10 college basketball players in history. The only reason this isn’t universally accepted is that the rules changed, not the level of dominance.

If we ranked only the 65 players on this lost for whom we have actual Win Shares, Kareem and Walton are 1st and 2nd, and Davis is 5th - and tracing normal improvement range Davis would have very likely had the best Win Share in history if he played a sophomore season.

And yes, Michael Jordan is the greatest overall player - but considering only all college careers only with no consideration of the pro career that followed, I have him 4th.

Rank	Player (School)	WS / 10	Draft Pick (Overall)
1	Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (UCLA)	4.8	1
2	Bill Walton (UCLA)	4.5	1
3	Wilt Chamberlain (Kansas)	4.8	1
4	Michael Jordan (North Carolina)	2.6	3
5	Oscar Robertson (Cincinnati)	4.2	1
6	Bill Russell (San Francisco)	3.9	2
7	Anthony Davis (Kentucky)	3.9	1
8	Pete Maravich (LSU)	3.8	3
9	Jerry West (West Virginia)	3.7	2
10	Elvin Hayes (Houston)	3.6	1
11	David Robinson (Navy)	4	1
12	Jerry Lucas (Ohio State)	3.5	2
13	Tim Duncan (Wake Forest)	3.4	1
14	Larry Bird (Indiana State)	3.3	6
15	Julius Erving (UMass)	3.4	12
16	John Havlicek (Ohio State)	3	7
17	Elgin Baylor (Seattle)	3.3	1
18	Kevin Durant (Texas)	3.5	2
19	Rick Barry (Miami)	3.3	2
20	Shaquille O'Neal (LSU)	3.1	1
21	Hakeem Olajuwon (Houston)	3	1
22	Carmelo Anthony (Syracuse)	3	3
23	Ralph Sampson (Virginia)	3.1	1
24	Bob Cousy (Holy Cross)	3.2	10
25	Magic Johnson (Michigan State)	2.7	1
26	Danny Manning (Kansas)	3.2	1
27	Bob Pettit (LSU)	3.1	2
28	Clyde Lovellette (Kansas)	3	1
29	Irv Torgoff (Long Island University)	3.6	50
30	Bob McAdoo (North Carolina)	3	2
31	Wes Unseld (Louisville)	2.9	2
32	Christian Laettner (Duke)	2.6	3
33	James Worthy (North Carolina)	2.2	1
34	Frank Kaminsky (Wisconsin)	3.4	9
35	Reggie Miller (UCLA)	2	11
36	Dwyane Wade (Marquette)	2.9	5
37	Dave Bing (Syracuse)	2.9	2
38	Scott May (Indiana)	2.4	2
39	Isiah Thomas (Indiana)	2.4	2
40	Patrick Ewing (Georgetown)	2.9	1
41	Vince Carter (North Carolina)	2.1	5
42	Shane Battier (Duke)	2.7	6
43	Dave Cowens (Florida State)	2.6	4
44	Gary Payton (Oregon State)	2.7	2
45	Ray Allen (Connecticut)	2.6	5
46	Artis Gilmore (Jacksonville)	2.7	1
47	Jameer Nelson (St. Joe's)	3.5	20
48	Bob Lanier (St. Bonaventure)	2.8	1
49	Kawhi Leonard (San Diego State)	3.1	15
50	Bo Kimble (LMU)	2.8	8
51	Jason Kidd (California)	2.5	2
52	Nate Thurmond (Bowling Green)	2.3	3
53	Draymond Green (Michigan State)	2.5	35
54	Glen Rice (Michigan)	3.1	4
55	Ken Sailors (Wyoming)	2.5	100
56	Allen Iverson (Georgetown)	2.3	1
57	Chris Paul (Wake Forest)	3.1	4
58	Kemba Walker (Connecticut)	3.7	9
59	Chris Webber (Michigan)	2.4	1
60	Damian Lillard (Weber State)	3.6	6
61	Zach Edey (Purdue)	4.2	9
62	Walt Hazzard (UCLA)	2.3	1
63	Cooper Flagg (Duke)	2.2	1
64	Austin Carr (Notre Dame)	2.7	1
65	Larry Johnson (UNLV)	3	1
66	John Stockton (Gonzaga)	2.2	16
67	Bernard King (Tennessee)	2.2	7
68	Jimmy Butler (Marquette)	2.4	30
69	Jared Butler (Baylor)	2.7	40
70	Ja Morant (Murray State)	3.8	2
71	Mark Aguirre (DePaul)	2.1	1
72	Johnny Dawkins (Duke)	2.3	10
73	Dominique Wilkins (Georgia)	2.6	3
74	Cazzie Russell (Michigan)	2.6	1
75	Alonzo Mourning (Georgetown)	2.8	2
76	Doug McDermott (Creighton)	3.7	11
77	Steve Nash (Santa Clara)	2.8	15
78	Buddy Hield (Oklahoma)	3.3	6
79	Evan Mobley (USC)	3.2	3
80	Luka Garza (Iowa)	3.9	52
81	Paul Pierce (Kansas)	2.1	10
82	Ben Gordon (Connecticut)	2.9	3
83	Tyler Kolek (Marquette)	3.6	34
84	Walt Frazier (Southern Illinois)	2.4	5
85	Sean May (North Carolina)	3	13
86	Andre Miller (Utah)	3	8
87	Brandon Roy (Washington)	2.9	6
88	Ochai Agbaji (Kansas)	2.8	14
89	Brook Lopez (Stanford)	2.6	10
90	Shane Larkin (Miami)	3	18
91	Ryan Kalkbrenner (Creighton)	3.3	44
92	Sidney Moncrief (Arkansas)	2	5
93	Armen Gilliam (UNLV)	2.6	2
94	Drew Timme (Gonzaga)	3.4	100
95	Bob Kurland (Oklahoma St.)	2.4	40
96	Nigel Williams-Goss (Gonzaga)	2.9	55
97	Greg Oden (Ohio St.)	2.3	1
98	Reggie King (Alabama)	1.8	25
99	Derrick Rose (Memphis)	2	1
100	Charlie Ward (Florida State)	2.4	26