The GOAT Index
Every qualifying player in NBA history, scored on 50-odd measurable attributes. Each one is standardized within its own season, so a number means “this far above his league that year” — 55% true shooting was extraordinary in 1975 and ordinary in 2020. Attributes that didn’t exist in a player’s era are dropped and the remaining weights renormalized, so nobody is punished for playing before steals were recorded.
The weights are the argument. The data is not.
Peak is the mean of a player’s best three seasons, prime his best seven, career a minutes-weighted mean of all of them. Scores blend the three. A dash means the attribute didn’t exist in his era — steals and blocks start in 1973-74, turnovers in 1977-78, on/off in 2007-08 — and its weight is redistributed rather than counted as zero. Regular-season stats come from a Basketball-Reference mirror, the postseason from Basketball-Reference directly, and game logs from stats.nba.com.