
The Basketball 100
Sports Series, Book 2
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Narrated by:
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Jaime Lincoln Smith
About this listen
A celebration of basketball by way of the 100 greatest players to ever grace the court in the history of the NBA—from The Athletic’s foremost basketball writers and analysts the game has to offer.
Over the course of 100 luminous player profiles, the best sports newsroom on the planet paints vivid portraits of the game’s most compelling characters. There’s George Mikan, who was cut from his high school team because he wore glasses, then went on to become the fledgling NBA’s first transcendent star. Gary Payton, called “The Glove” for his skintight defense, who talked as much trash to his teammates as he did to his opponents on the court. Dennis Rodman, who started playing basketball at age 20, and in a few short years went from working as a janitor at the airport to being one of the strangest superstars that sport has ever known. Allen Iverson, who drew inspiration from hip hop for his inimitable style and swagger, on and off the court. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who was so dominant in the paint that they changed the rules—and Steph Curry, who was so dominant outside it that he seemed to expand the very boundaries of the court.
The Basketball 100, edited by award-winning reporters David Aldridge and John Hollinger, also answers the game’s toughest, most important questions: How should we weight championship rings, versus statistical profiles, versus the “eye test”? Were the great players of yesteryear, like Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell, propelled by the inferior athleticism of their competition or would they have been transcendent in any era? And of course, who’s the GOAT—MJ or LeBron? Speaking of GOATs, for the book, Hollinger (inventor of the statistical metric PER) has created a new benchmark, GOAT Points.
Wonderfully written, authoritative, and full of joy, The Basketball 100 is a fitting tribute to the greatest sport in the world.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2024 David Aldridge and John Hollinger (P)2024 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Longer than Moby-Dick and nearly as ambitious,The Baseball 100 is a one-of-a-kind work by award-winning sportswriter and lifelong student of the game Joe Posnanski that tells the story of the sport through the remarkable lives of its 100 greatest players. In the book’s introduction, Pulitzer Prize-winning commentator George F. Will marvels, “Posnanski must already have lived more than 200 years. How else could he have acquired such a stock of illuminating facts and entertaining stories about the rich history of this endlessly fascinating sport?”
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Just OK. Too Tangential & Distracting
- By Matthew R. on 01-21-23
By: Joe Posnanski
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Boost Your Basketball IQ
- How to Think the Game, Be the Smartest Player on the Court, and Win More
- By: Jason Calabrese
- Narrated by: Jason Calabrese
- Length: 2 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Much of today’s basketball training focuses on improving speed, agility, scoring moves, and shooting abilities. While this increases physical skills, it doesn’t teach young athletes the mental ins and outs of the game. Boost Your Basketball IQ teaches players and coaches arguably the most important (and neglected) skill of all: game awareness—a skill that most players often don’t develop until late in their careers.
By: Jason Calabrese
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Coaching from the Base Up
- Transformative Basketball Drills and Practice Plans from Expert Coaches
- By: Mr. Keith Rumjahn
- Narrated by: Kyle Marler
- Length: 3 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Are you a beginner coach looking for drills for your next practice? Or a time-strapped volunteer parent coach? Coaching from the Base Up consults experts, such as Dell Curry, Brian McCormick, Bob Bigelow, and more to share paradigm-shifting ideas, drills, and practice plans.
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enlightening
- By Sharon Enrietta on 11-01-22
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Why So Serious?
- The Untold Story of NBA Champion Nikola Jokic
- By: Mike Singer
- Narrated by: Roger Wayne
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Why So Serious? takes listeners on Nikola Jokic’s long, strange, and incredibly unlikely journey to becoming the heartbeat of the champion Denver Nuggets and the best basketball player on the planet. As he traces Jokic’s transformation from his humble beginnings in Sombor, Serbia, sports journalist Mike Singer captures the witty irreverence, unparalleled competitiveness, and slight mischievousness of the MVP fondly known as “The Joker.”
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Great anecdotes
- By David O. Kenny on 02-28-25
By: Mike Singer
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Why We Love Baseball
- A History in 50 Moments
- By: Joe Posnanski
- Narrated by: Joe Posnanski, Ellen Adair
- Length: 11 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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New York Times bestselling author Joe Posnanski is back with a masterful ode to the game: a countdown of 50 of the most memorable moments in baseball’s history, to make you fall in love with the sport all over again. Posnanski writes of major moments that created legends, and of forgotten moments almost lost to time. It's Willie Mays’s catch, Babe Ruth’s called shot, and Kirk Gibson’s limping home run; the slickest steals; the biggest bombs; and the most triumphant no-hitters.
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Narration
- By Peter on 01-10-24
By: Joe Posnanski
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Kingdom on Fire
- Kareem, Wooden, Walton, and the Turbulent Days of the UCLA Basketball Dynasty
- By: Scott Howard-Cooper
- Narrated by: Feodor Chin
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Los Angeles native and longtime sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times, Scott Howard-Cooper draws on more than a hundred interviews and extensive access to many of the principal figures, including Wooden’s family, to deliver a rich narrative that reveals the turmoil at the heart of this storied college basketball program.
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Outstanding Biographical Work
- By Brian J. P. on 02-14-25
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When the Game Was War
- The NBA's Greatest Season
- By: Rich Cohen
- Narrated by: Cary Hite
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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The 1980s were a transformative decade for the NBA. Since its founding in 1946, the league had evolved from a bruising, earthbound game of mostly nameless, underpaid players to one in which athletes became household names for their thrilling, physics-defying play. The 1987–88 season was the peak of that golden era, a year of incredible drama that featured a pantheon of superstars in their prime—the most future Hall of Famers competing at one time in any given season—battling for the title, and for their respective legacies.
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Phil Jackson accuses Red Auerbach of cheap tactics
- By Sean on 01-03-24
By: Rich Cohen
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Showboat
- The Life of Kobe Bryant
- By: Roland Lazenby
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 21 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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The definitive portrait of Kobe Bryant, from the author of Michael Jordan. Eighteen-time All-Star, scorer of 81 points in a single game, MVP, and one of the best shooting guards in NBA league history: Kobe Bryant is among basketball's absolute greatest players, and his importance to the sport is undeniable. Third on the NBA career scoring list and owner of five championship rings, he is an undisputed all-time great, one deserving of this deep and definitive biography.
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KOBE BEAN BRYANT
- By Allaeldien Abdelrahman on 12-14-18
By: Roland Lazenby
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The Back Roads to March
- The Unsung, Unheralded, and Unknown Heroes of a College Basketball Season
- By: John Feinstein
- Narrated by: John Feinstein
- Length: 14 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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John Feinstein has already taken listeners into the inner circles of top college basketball programs in The Legends Club. This time, Feinstein pulls back the curtain on college basketball's lesser-known Cinderella stories - the smaller programs who no one expects to win, who have no chance of attracting the most coveted high school recruits, who rarely send their players on to the NBA. Feinstein follows a handful of players, coaches, and schools who dream, not of winning the NCAA tournament but of making it past their first or second round games.
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A love letter to college basketball
- By Hebern on 01-27-22
By: John Feinstein
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The Why Is Everything
- A Story of Football, Rivalry, and Revolution
- By: Michael Silver
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 16 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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When Kyle Shanahan became the NFL's youngest offensive coordinator in 2008, he had one prevailing rule: Tell me the why. If a colleague couldn't justify his position by providing the unassailable reasoning behind it, he was told to get the hell out of Shanahan's office. Shanahan and the members of his coaching tree—including Sean McVay, Mike McDaniel, Raheem Morris, and Matt LaFleur—came up in a sport where innovation was the exception, not the rule. There had been brilliant football minds before, from Paul Brown to Bill Walsh to Bill Belichick.
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learning behind the scenes details about NFL coaches
- By Anonymous User on 03-30-25
By: Michael Silver
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Michael Jordan
- The Life
- By: Roland Lazenby
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 21 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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The definitive biography of a legendary athlete. The Shrug. The Shot. The Flu Game. When most people think of him, they think of his beautiful shots with the game on the line, his body totally in sync with the ball - hitting nothing but net. But for all his greatness, this scion of a complex family from North Carolina's Coastal Plain has a darker side: He's a ruthless competitor and a lover of high stakes. There's never been a biography that encompassed the dual nature of his character and looked so deeply at Jordan on and off the court - until now.
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horrible naration
- By Hiro on 03-27-18
By: Roland Lazenby
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Pipeline to the Pros
- How D3, Small-College Nobodies Rose to Rule the NBA
- By: Ben Kaplan, Danny Parkins
- Narrated by: Barry Abrams
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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For the first time in league history, NBA coaches and general managers are just as likely to have played Division III basketball as they are to have played in the NBA. While the number of former D3 players working in the NBA is higher than ever, small college alums have served in leadership positions since the league's founding.
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For basketball junkies
- By steven on 11-04-24
By: Ben Kaplan, and others
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Coach K
- The Rise and Reign of Mike Krzyzewski
- By: Ian O'Connor
- Narrated by: Kiff Vandenheuvel
- Length: 16 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Mike Krzyzewski, known worldwide as “Coach K,” is a five-time national champion at Duke, the NCAA's all-time leader in victories with nearly 1,200, and the first man to lead Team USA to three Olympic basketball gold medals. Through unprecedented access to Krzyzewski’s best friends, closest advisers, fiercest adversaries, and generations of his players and assistants, three-time New York Times bestselling author Ian O’Connor takes you behind the Blue Devil curtain with a penetrating examination of the great, but flawed leader as he closes out his iconic career.
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Jon “Shayer”?
- By Lawdevil on 03-02-22
By: Ian O'Connor
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Dynasty Restored
- How Larry Bird and the 1984 Boston Celtics Conquered the NBA and Changed Basketball
- By: Thomas J. Whalen
- Narrated by: Asa Siegel
- Length: 9 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Ronald Reagan declares the Soviet Union an Evil Empire. The Apple Macintosh personal computer makes its debut. Michael Jackson's Thriller dominates the charts. And Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics capture the NBA championship over the Los Angeles Lakers. It was 1984, and for the NBA and the nation, the year was full of milestone moments. In Dynasty Restored, Thomas J. Whalen explores this dramatic season.
By: Thomas J. Whalen
What listeners say about The Basketball 100
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Collin Winemiller
- 03-13-25
It’s a Good Review of the Best 100 Players of Professional Basketball
You might already know all of these players but it reviews stats, life and personalities of the top 100 players since around the 1950s. Make your own judgment about #1, it’s up to you.
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- Diddy
- 03-17-25
Excellent recap of the top 100 basketball
What I truly enjoyed was the excellent research in composition of this book. Not everyone will agree with the list, but you will learn a lot about players you have not heard of. It did a great broad show of all the different era’s.
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- C Gray
- 04-25-25
How is Shaq ahead of Duncan???
I just don’t get it. I mean it’s Tim Duncan. I guess it makes sense somewhere.
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