No. 5 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (70 first-place votes, 5,203 points)
Few, if any, players in basketball history have come close to replicating the perfect combination of power, size, style and grace that characterized Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s game during his stellar, 20-year NBA career. His sky-hooking, bespectacled image came to personify the Lakers' "Showtime" era of the 1980s, making him a recognizable figure even outside the basketball world.
For 14 years he treated the Lakers' fans to an almost otherworldly display of basketball, helping the team win five NBA titles before retiring in 1989 as the league’s all-time leading scorer. His ambidextrous sky hook was virtually unstoppable, his blocking and rebounding superb and his shooting showcased beauty and grit at the same time. "He's the most beautiful athlete in sports," Magic Johnson once told Sports Illustrated.
Born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. in New York in 1947, the 7-foot-2 center leaped onto the national stage at UCLA where he led the Bruins to three national titles under coach John Wooden in the late 1960s. He was selected first overall by the Milwaukee Bucks in the 1969 NBA draft and made an immediate impact, averaging 28.8 points and 14.5 rebounds per game to earn NBA rookie-of-the-year honors.
The following season Alcindor led Milwaukee to its first NBA title and converted from Catholicism to Islam, taking the name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, which means "noble, powerful servant."
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