Oscar Robertson

Oscar Robertson averaged a triple-double for an entire NBA season in 1961-62: 30.8 points, 12.5 rebounds, and 11.4 assists per game across 79 games. The feat was not replicated until Russell Westbrook in 2016-17, more than five decades later. In the context of when it happened — in the third year of Robertson's career, before the assist was fully systematized as a statistical category, with basketball still evolving its conceptual vocabulary for what a point guard was supposed to do — the line describes a player who had simply outgrown the conventional definitions.

His career averages across 14 seasons stand at 25.7 points, 7.5 rebounds, and 9.5 assists per game. No player in the 75-year history of the NBA has finished a career with those three numbers at that level simultaneously. The rebounds came from his size — Robertson was six feet five inches tall at the point guard position, which was genuinely unusual in the early 1960s — and from his willingness to work the boards when his team needed it. The assists came from reading defenses a step ahead of where they were, delivering passes in windows that closed before most players would have recognized they were open.