Elgin Baylor

Elgin Baylor averaged 38.3 points and 18.6 rebounds per game in 1961-62 — the third-highest single-season scoring average in NBA history — for a Los Angeles Lakers team that lost to the Boston Celtics in the Finals. He also scored 71 points in a single game against New York in 1960, a record that stood until Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 two years later. Baylor's greatness was continuous and extreme; it simply existed alongside the most dominant player and the most dominant team in the sport's early history simultaneously.

What Baylor pioneered was the physical vocabulary of the modern small forward. In an era when wings were expected to spot up or play catch-and-shoot roles, Baylor drove, hung in the air, changed hands at the rim, and found contact-absorption techniques that anticipate the Euro step and floater language of modern offense by decades. Both Jerry West and his coaches credited Baylor with a level of improvisational creativity above the rim that the NBA had simply not seen at that position before him.

He appeared in eight NBA Finals and won zero championships — not because of his performance, but because Boston had Bill Russell and a dynasty that no team in the league was structured to beat. Baylor retired nine games into the 1971-72 season; the Lakers won the championship that year without him, a biographical irony that the sport has not produced again.

Baylor attended Seattle University before the Minneapolis Lakers selected him 1st overall in 1958. He is considered the prototype for the modern small forward position and one of the most important innovators in the game's playing history.