The Best Careers on the Board
Every season since 1999-00 on one ruler: who added the most, who did it fastest, and the one active player keeping pace with the leader.
By Ben StupendousOct 5, 20264 min read
In February 2023, LeBron James passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to become the NBA’s career scoring leader, and the argument about the best career ever got louder instead of settling. Points were never going to settle it. A career is worth what it added to a team, and that’s much harder to count.
People have been trying for a while. Basketball-Reference keeps career leaderboards for Win Shares and for VORP, and LeBron James passed Michael Jordan for the career VORP lead in 2016.1 Ben Taylor ranked the 40 best careers in league history by how much each player raised his teams’ chances of winning a title, adding every season together.2 This is a narrower version of the same question, on our own number.
The rules
One ruler: Marginal WAR (mWAR), the wins a player added above the kind of player any team can sign for the minimum, every season since 1999-00, added up. Beside it, for how good rather than how much, career Marginal Plus Minus (mPM): his rating per 100 possessions, averaged over his seasons by the minutes he played.3
A confession before the list: the board starts in 1999-00, the first season with the play-by-play our ratings need. Anyone whose career began earlier is counted only from there, and they are marked below. Jordan’s Bulls years aren’t here at all. That may not be true for long: the Historical RAPM Project has spent years rebuilding play-by-play for the seasons before it existed, game by game from video. So far it has about one game in six from 1984-85 to 1995-96, and samples of a few games from earlier seasons.4 If it fills in, the career argument gets a lot more interesting. For now, this is a list of the most value added since 1999-00, which rewards being great and being there, not a list of the greatest players.
The leader
| Player | Seasons | Career mWAR | Per season | Career mPM | Worth, today’s $ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LeBron James | 23 | 426.6 | 18.5 | +5.5 | $3.9B |
| Dirk Nowitzki ‡ | 20 | 301.6 | 15.1 | +4.5 | $2.9B |
| Tim Duncan ‡ | 17 | 290.8 | 17.1 | +5.4 | $2.7B |
| Chris Paul | 21 | 285.7 | 13.6 | +4.8 | $2.7B |
| Kevin Garnett ‡ | 17 | 283.3 | 16.7 | +5.6 | $2.6B |
| Stephen Curry | 17 | 242.9 | 14.3 | +5.2 | $2.3B |
| Paul Pierce ‡ | 18 | 216.8 | 12.0 | +3.4 | $2.1B |
| Kevin Durant | 18 | 209.4 | 11.6 | +3.2 | $2.0B |
| Nikola Jokić | 11 | 199.8 | 18.2 | +6.3 | $1.9B |
| James Harden | 17 | 199.4 | 11.7 | +3.2 | $1.9B |
| Kobe Bryant ‡ | 17 | 188.1 | 11.1 | +2.7 | $1.8B |
| Steve Nash ‡ | 15 | 187.1 | 12.5 | +3.9 | $1.8B |
‡ career began before 1999-00; only the seasons since are counted. Worth: each season is worth what the open market paid for that much production that season, as a share of that season’s cap, restated at today’s cap of $155M and added up, so a 2001 season and a 2025 season count alike. Pay doesn’t enter: this is what he was worth, not what he earned.
LeBron James has 426.6 mWAR over 23 seasons. The next-best career that is fully on the board, Chris Paul’s, has 285.7. The gap between them, 140.9 wins, would by itself be the 24th-best career on the board, out of 2,252.
He was also a bargain. He was worth more than he was paid in every one of his 23 seasons, and over his career he returned $3.0B beyond his pay, in today’s money.5
The pace
Nikola Jokić has 199.8 mWAR in eleven seasons: 18.2 a season, against 18.5 for LeBron James. His career mPM, +6.3, is the best of anyone on the board with 20,000 minutes. Through his first eleven seasons, LeBron James had 250.2, so the leader is still ahead at the same point, by 50.4 wins: he started younger.
The rate is the easy part. On this board, only LeBron James has kept a pace like that for another decade, and Nikola Jokić would need to do it into his forties to catch him.
The one to watch
The one to watch is just starting. Victor Wembanyama has 32.8 mWAR in his first three seasons, and his rating has climbed every year: +3.3 → +4.7 → +5.6. At 22, that is higher than Nikola Jokić was at the same age, +4.4, and just behind LeBron James, +6.0.6 The total will take a decade to tell. The rating is the thing to watch each spring.
Figures: every season on the players board, 1999-00 to 2025-26, as of this build. Wins are on this model’s own scale and dollars at the open-market price of a win; the method explains both.
- VORP is a box-score total; the metrics column has how it compares with ours. ↩
- Ben Taylor, “The championship odds of short-lived megastars (CORP),” Nylon Calculus, 2017, introduces the measure behind his list. ↩
- The same scale as everywhere on this site. LeBron James’s best season reads 26.8 mWAR. ↩
- “Possession-Level Player Impact in the Pre-Play-by-Play NBA Era: A Video-Reconstructed RAPM Database, 1984–1996” (2026) describes how it was built and checked. ↩
- The league caps what a star can be paid, so the better he is, the bigger the gap. The contracts column has the deals one at a time. ↩
- Each at his age in that season, on the same scale. Wembanyama’s total trails both at the same point because he has played fewer minutes, not because he has played worse. ↩
