Michael Jordan vs LeBron James NBA GOAT debate settled as expert reveals his top 12 players of all time

Football has Lionel Messi vs Cristiano Ronaldo and Pele vs Diego Maradona. Basketball has Michael Jordan vs LeBron James.

Jordan and James are NBA icons. No ifs and no buts.

Both have collected NBA championships by the armful. Both have shown up for the finals in a big way and taken home MVP honours time and time again.

Picking the greatest basketball player of all time is no easier than choosing between Messi and Ronaldo or Pele and Maradona, but are they even locks for the top two?

Not according to sports YouTuber Nick Wright, host of the cleverly titled 'What's Wright? With Nick Wright', who has listed his top 12 NBA stars of all time and left one of the two leading greatest-of-all-time candidates outside the top pair.

Wright, who boasts more than 199,000 subscribers on YouTube, reeled off a dozen NBA legends in a video post on X, formerly Twitter, and placed Los Angeles Lakers leading light 'King' James in top spot.

James is a four-time NBA champion with the Lakers, Cleveland Cavaliers and Miami Heat, a four-time finals MVP and a four-time league MVP. Now 40 years of age, he's still going strong.

Despite six championships, six finals MVP awards and five NBA MVP awards in a revered career with the Chicago Bulls, Jordan is not Wright's pick in second place.

Air Jordan is in third behind James and the great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Abdul-Jabbar is another six-time NBA champion and was also crowned the NBA's most valuable player on six separate occasions. The monolithic center played the majority of his career with the Lakers after collecting his first championship ring with the Milwaukee Bucks, who drafted the New Yorker from UCLA in 1969.

LeBron James is the NBA GOAT

YouTuber Wright completes his top five with Magic Johnson, another world-famous figure and legend of the Lakers, and Bill Russell, who won 11 championships as a center in the incredible Boston Celtics teams of the 1950s and 1960s.

There's room in the top ten for fellow Celtics icon Larry Bird as well as Wilt Chamberlain, Tim Duncan, Hakeem Olajuwon and of course the late Kobe Bryant, who slots into eighth place.

Shaquille O’Neal and Stephen Curry round out Wright's delightful dozen.

Like top dog LeBron, 37-year-old Curry is still an NBA mainstay, racking up four championships as a point guard for the Golden State Warriors.