Image via Complex Original
This list is about point guards, but let’s start with something former point guard Mark Jackson said about center Joakim Noah over the weekend: “He raises the stakes for any team he’s on.” Jackson is getting at the fundamental quality of everyone on this list. One of the scariest things that anyone can do is give something their absolute everything. That’s what players like Noah, and the others on this list, do. They raise the stakes because you have to be willing to reveal your weaknesses and faults to match their unalloyed intensity. These are the players that instigate and inspire. These are The Most Fearless Point Guards in NBA History.
Russell Westbrook
Team(s): Oklahoma City Thunder
No. of seasons: 6
Let’s start in the present day. Russell Westbrook is not interested in your opinion—about how he dresses, plays, talks, doesn’t talk, whatever. Propriety is someone else’s problem; Westbrook is only interested in being Westbrook. There’s something within him that burns incredibly hot—that converts rebounds into coast-to-coast two-handed tomahawk dunks and moments of doubt into incendiary performances.
As Westbrook’s game has matured, his passing has become more incisive, his touch more deft, but the edge he brings to every moment hasn’t dulled. The only hesitation is the knee-buckling pause at the top of the key before Russ rams down another drive to the rim. The Twitter meme #LetWestbrookBeWestbrook is entirely unnecessary. There have been plenty of people who think they know better. But he’s not looking for permission or acceptance. Something tells us that Westbrook isn’t interested in anyone letting him do anything.
Gary Payton
Team(s): Seattle SuperSonics, Milwaukee Bucks, Los Angeles Lakers, Boston Celtics, Miami Heat
No. of seasons: 18
Gary Payton might be the skinniest bully in NBA history. The man who defined defense in the early-’90s by shutting down the best athletes in the world was too cool to dunk. At 6'4", 185 pounds of sinew and smack talk, Payton mercilessly punished his opponents with his patented left-block spin move and a verbal assault that ran the full 48.
Watch Payton guard Jordan in the ’96 Finals. Conventional wisdom was that you didn’t challenge Jordan too directly—didn’t want to piss him off. That is not Payton’s plan. He fronts him, bumps him, scurries under his chest, and lets him hear about it the whole time. Already down 0-3 when George Karl finally let Payton loose on Jordan, the Sonics were doomed. But Payton held Jordan to 36% shooting over the final 3 games by fighting him for every inch, pushing the much bigger guard from his favorite spots and generally being a terrible nuisance.
Sam Cassell
Team(s): Houston Rockets, Phoenix Suns, Dallas Mavericks, New Jersey Nets, Milwaukee Bucks, Minnesota Timberwolves, Los Angeles Clippers, Boston Celtics
No. of seasons: 19
Sometimes bravery isn’t being willing to risk physical danger for teammates, or the glory of victory. It’s not always high-flying, death-defying dunks over towering opponents willing to lay you low with a mid-air forearm shiver.
No, sometimes bravery means dancing. It means dancing like no one in the world can cage your beautiful soul; dancing while using both hands and all your strength to gather your manhood and prevent it from dragging on the court where you just drilled a mid-range jumper. The NBA changed the size of the key because of Wilt Chamberlain. After Sam Cassell, they outlawed the “Big Balls Dance.” If your dance is the Big Balls Dance, you have done your job on this earth.
Allen Iverson
Team(s): Philadelphia 76ers, Denver Nuggets, Detroit Pistons, Memphis Grizzlies
No. of seasons: 17
I once got to go down on the court while the Nuggets were warming up when Iverson played for them. This guy is listed at 6'0" but up close I can say that there is no way he’s taller than 5'10". The shortest player to ever win MVP is even shorter than you think.
Of course, Iverson defined a certain kind of fearlessness that went beyond his willingness to throw himself at the rim and pick himself back up every time he crashed to the floor. His cultural impact for my generation is hard to overstate. There is only one famous highlight of Michael Jordan getting torched on defense. There is only one loss in the 2000 Lakers blitzkrieg playoff run. Both belong to Iverson—a player who never conquered the league but contributed some of the most brilliant moments in NBA history.
John Stockton
Team(s): Utah Jazz
No. of seasons: 19
John Stockton never revealed a discernible emotion outside of a look of general concern, so it is possible that he has never known happiness, let alone fear. His recent State Farm commercials feature him “letting loose” by awkwardly high-fiving some strange family when their car explodes or whatever. He has to wear those aviators because when he did the first few takes without them everyone on set worried that his vacant, unreadable expression would too accurately convey the personality of an insurance company.
But on the court this is pretty handy. Ask any point guard of the ’90s who the toughest dude to play was, and they’ll say Stockton. He was a target every single game of his adult life, and he killed it. Trust everyone from Gary Payton to Stephon Marbury—you do not want it with Stockton.
Isiah Thomas
Team(s): Detroit Pistons
No. of seasons: 13
It sure helps when you’ve got guys like Rick Mahorn and Bill Laimbeer for your muscle, but not one of those legendary Pistons players was nastier than Isiah. But small and mean as he was, the physical stuff gets a little overblown when talking about the Bad Boys, and his team’s association with Jordan’s rise has cast the two-time champions as mere foils. He’s become the NBA history version of Hector of Troy.
So let’s take a second and appreciate Isiah on his own, and not as the leader of the team that helped create Jordan. Go to the ’88 Finals against the Lakers. Go watch him wreck his ankle while wearing what appear to be very cool low-top racquetball shoes, then drop 25 points in the third quarter on one leg.
Jason Williams
Team(s): Sacramento Kings, Memphis Grizzlies, Miami Heat, Orlando Magic
No. of seasons: 13
The legend of Jason Williams will be safe so long as there is YouTube. His game was made for mixtapes, but here’s the thing that gets lost when you watch: You didn’t need a season to accumulate these moves. The guy threw behind-the-back passes as a way to swing the ball. He spent so much time with a basketball in his hands that the flash became his fundamentals. At this level of competition every margin is exploited—do you really want to risk your job on an elbow-pass? When you play like Williams, you can’t play with a shred of doubt in your soul.
Muggsy Bogues
Team(s): Washington Bullets, Charlotte Hornets, Golden State Warriors, Toronto Raptors
No. of seasons: 15
Look, most of the guys on this list just emanated some kind of intangible fearlessness. Not Bogues. Bogues’ fearlessness is very, very real. Bogues grew the height of everyone else’s elbows and then stopped. Bogues, on the court with NBA players, is like a child playing in traffic. He shared the hardwood every game with guys literally twice his size—some even bigger. The whole point of basketball is to get the ball up above 10 feet. Size is the single biggest advantage there is. Bogues makes this list because he was far from a novelty act. He was a team leader who once averaged a double-double. He’s on this list because he was such a badass that everyone decided Tyrone was not a hard enough name.
Derek Fisher
Team(s): Los Angeles, Golden State Warriors, Oklahoma City Thunder, Utah Jazz, Dallas Mavericks
No. of seasons: 18
God, this kills me. But there’s only one player in NBA history who could tell Kobe to calm down and stop acting like he must single-handedly score every damn point…and Kobe listened. Kobe’s personality has overwhelmed pretty much every other player he’s ever teamed with. No one has played more games with Kobe and been there for all five titles. I truly wish I could leave him out, but all that junk about leadership and mental toughness and setting an example of selflessness and spirit—well, Fisher sort of lived the cliché. He was also kind of dirty and flopped like, well, a fish, and that’s why coaching the Knicks is just him getting what he deserves. But he also deserves to be on this list.
Walt “Clyde” Frazier
Team(s): New York Knicks, Cleveland Cavaliers
No. of seasons: 13
I’ll be real here: I’m not going to claim that I’ve gone back and watched the ’70s Knicks and can break down the details of Walt “Clyde” Frazier’s game. But his inclusion here is really more about his legendary status as a big-game hero during the Knicks championship runs, and his very public journey of sartorial self-discovery.
Walt was a kid who grew up playing on dirt courts in Georgia, and he played his basketball at a DII school in Carbondale, Illinois. You know what he does now? He calls Knick games and then spends the offseason reading a thesaurus in St. Croix. He once said, “I didn’t want to vegetate as Clyde.” So he didn’t.