Talent⛹️‍♂️Score

For the final category, Talent⛹️‍♂️Score, this one is where it was impossible to be entirely subjective and to eliminate any possible bias.  I've done my absolute best to remain as consistent and unbiased as possible here, watched film, did my research, and carefully completed each player's scorecards to my best ability.  I will say the process that is done here works exactly as desired, but in terms of rating skills it is impossible to be perfect.  So keep that in mind when the actual rankings come out.


There are 2 main differing aspects to how a player's Talent⛹️‍♂️Score is calculated.  It's not an ideally perfect system, but the desired results have been achieved for the most part.  The two aspects here are split into what I call "Prime-Talent" and "Longevity of Talent."

"Prime-Talent"

The "Prime-Talent" (PT) is a scorecard that ranks 11 skills for each player from 1 to 10. The 11 skills are

And similar to how the Stats📈Score is calculated, each skill here is also not scored to a linear scale. Comparing a 10 in Scoring to someone else who is an 8 in Scoring is worlds more impressive than if you were to compare someone who is a 4 in Scoring to someone else who is a 2 in Scoring. In both cases, there is only a rating difference of 2 out of 10. But the "gap of impressiveness", to use that term again, gets wider and wider the higher you go, because it gets much much harder to get closer and closer to achieving a 10 rating in one of the skills.

This is how the Calculator evaluates each rating level for each skill into "Legacy Points", 

And after the result for each skill is added together, it is then multiplied by the root of that player's "Prime Player Value" (PPV), which is essentially the highest tier of play this player sustained for at least 3 seasons. For example, Hakeem Olajuwon is recognized for having 11 Legendary seasons, so he more than overqualifies as being recognized as a "Legendary" player for his PPV, as he has more than at least 3 such seasons.

(If you are unfamiliar with the different tiers of Player Values that I use, you can refer back to an earlier breakdown post in this series and find more information about it, in "Breakdowns: The Indices." I will also refer to these tiers again later in this post.)

So for the case of Olajuwon, because he is recognized as a "Legendary" player, his PPV is 25. So taking the root of that, which is 5, the calculated result for each of his skills are multiplied by 5, and then all added together. The final result is then the "Prime-Talent" score in Legacy points.


PT  =  (Sc + Sh + R + P + D + BH + A +C + BIQ + In + L) * √PPV

Longevity of Talent

The second aspect is a system I created that keeps track of the # of seasons a player had played at each Player Value (PV) tier level throughout their careers. I simply refer to this as a players's "Longevity of Talent."

The 8 different tiers of players and their associated PV's are:

I have charted, graphed and maintained every player's career, and which seasons I classify as which PV tier that each caliber of season of their's belongs too. Every single one.


As you can see in the image, each Player-Season (PS) is treated as an xy coordinate on a graph, and in each cell the "value" of any individual season is calculated. 

Quite simply, the values given in each cell are the results of how good of a season that player had and the % of games they played that year. Every season that a player has gets summed up and then is rooted again (2/3 root this time rather than 1/2). This career result for a player is finalized to the left under "Longevity⛹️‍♂️Talent".

The final step effectively is to multiply together a player's Prime⛹️‍♂️Talent score and their Longevity⛹️‍♂️Talent score. The final result is that player's Talent⛹️‍♂️Score.

Final Conclusions

The Talent⛹️‍♂️Score was by far the trickiest category for me to try to balance. Too easily this alone could sway the entire order of this list one way or the other. But funny enough, this actually kinda proves to me ultimately that at the end of the day, anyone and everyone can define for themselves what is most important when it comes to the greatest ever. You might value individual talent above all else, or another guy might hyper-value rings or playoff success. Others can be swayed by MVPs or stats.  At the end of the day, technically there is no wrong answers. 

Anyways, that is all. This is the final breakdown before I start revealing the official top-50 from this Calculator. Feel free to ask any questions that I did not get to cover up until this point, and I'll do my best to answer them. Please like and share with others, thanks!