Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley's basketball genius looked different in the pros than it did in college. At Princeton he was a scoring machine — north of 30 a game, the 1965 NCAA Tournament's most outstanding player, an Olympic gold medalist in 1964. With the Knicks he became something rarer: the tireless off-ball mover and sharp passer who made those celebrated 1970 and 1973 championship teams hum. He was never the leading man in New York, and that was rather the point — his value lived in the spacing, the extra pass, and the constant motion Red Holzman's team basketball demanded. A Rhodes Scholar who later spent 18 years as a U.S. senator from New Jersey, Bradley entered the Hall of Fame in 1983. He remains one of the game's most thoughtful ambassadors.