Andre Miller knows a thing or two about playing point guard in the NBA, having spent 17 years in the league from 1999 to 2016. There aren’t too many better to speak about the position, and Miller was asked to name the five greatest point guards of all time during an appearance on the All The Smoke podcast.
“Magic [Johnson], Isiah [Thomas], [John] Stockton, [Jason Kidd],” Miller said. “I didn’t see Oscar Robertson play.”
With Miller only naming former players, host Matt Barnes wondered if he wasn’t going to pick anyone from the modern era.
“I was a Steve Nash fan,” Miller stated. “I was a Steve Nash fan because I mean, who shoots 90-50-40, you know what I’m saying? I was a Steve Nash fan, but I mean you got Steph [Curry]. You gotta put Steph in there. Isiah, Steph, Magic, Stockton, and Kidd.”
That’s a pretty solid list. There can be very few arguments when it comes to most of these picks.
We start off with Magic Johnson, who is widely regarded as the greatest point guard of all time. Johnson won five titles, three Finals MVPs, three MVPs, and four assists titles in his career. He averaged 11.2 assists per game in the regular season and 12.3 in the playoffs, both of which are NBA records.
Golden State Warriors superstar Stephen Curry has emerged as a challenger to Johnson for the title of the greatest point guard in recent years. Curry has won four titles, a Finals MVP, two MVPs, and two scoring titles so far with the Warriors. He is quite different from the other four on the list, as they were all pass-first guards.
Johnson’s great rival, Isiah Thomas, was another fairly obvious pick here. Thomas won two titles, a Finals MVP, and one assists title in his career. The fact that he accomplished all that he did while battling with Johnson, Michael Jordan, and Larry Bird is quite impressive.
We get to John Stockton next, and he won a record nine assists titles in his career. Stockton is the NBA’s all-time leader for assists with 15,806, and with how the game has changed, it seems unlikely he’ll be surpassed anytime soon.
For the longest time, Jason Kidd was the one who’d gotten closest to Stockton’s record. He finished his career second on the assists charts with 12,091 assists to his name (since surpassed by Chris Paul). Kidd won five assists titles in his career to go with the NBA title he captured in 2011.
The likes of Kidd, Steve Nash, and Chris Paul are among the last all-time great traditional point guards in the NBA. Almost all the young guards nowadays, with the exception of Tyrese Haliburton, are two guards masquerading as point guards.
Rick Pitino, head coach of St John’s, recently stated that the point guard is “totally done” in basketball and that Paul was probably the last of his kind. Miller, who is the head coach of the Grand Rapids Gold in the G League, was asked about “the death of the point guard,” and he agrees the position is dying.
“I agree,” Miller said. “And just to be in the G-League and even be around some college players, just the conversation alone with some of these so-called point guards, it’s unfortunate. But it’s a scoring game. And these guys believe that, in order to make it, you got to put that ball through the hoop.”
Miller provided some insight there into the mindset of young guards who are entering the NBA. They want to try to score before they think about facilitating, which wasn’t the case once upon a time. You can’t completely fault these young players, though, as the NBA itself has changed so much.
