Thinking Basketball Podcast, my name is Ben.

Today it is a special episode. I've wanted to do this for a while it is the first ever

installment of what I'm just calling the Great Debate series and this is a series of

podcast debating and comparing great players in NBA history.

Today's first ever great debates episode is about the shooting guards specifically a topical

shooting guard mr. James Harden and we're going to look at him next to some of the

other great shooting guards of all time like Kobe Bryant, like

Duane Wade. We won't touch Michael Jordan here because to me he's just in a different stratosphere it would be a landslide

so there's not really much purpose there but on this next sort of level of

shooting guards there's a lot of meat to rip into and that's what we'll do.

The purpose of this series is to really think about the big ideas worth discussing for these

players. What are the key points to know about their careers?

What are the theoretical implications of the way they played? What are things to

know about the circumstances around when they played what teams they played for who they played with those are that's really the goal for each player and then of course understanding how that

translates into playoff performance in different contexts. We'll talk about

scaling or portability how well your game travels and fits that's the old classic term just

fit but really we only care about fit on high-level teams and unlike a lot of my past work on historical players, you can check out

if you want 85,000 words over on backpicks.com, under the top 40. I've gone deep in careers, but here the point of this series is really to focus on players when they're playing at their best.

So peak play or the prime years, if you will, understanding the characteristics of players within those seasons and within those time periods.

So, before we begin, let's quickly lay out the criteria just to be clear so we're all in the same page

if you wanted to make a list based on

entertainment or aesthetics guys in history who are the most innovative or

...