Some players have been Hall of Famers, champions, Finals MVPs, scoring leaders. And yet they were never in full-blown MVP consideration, to the point of never receiving a single first-place vote for the award in their careers. Who are the best of them?
To find out, we went through MVP voting history and pulled the all-time greats who came up empty on top-of-the-ballot support. A few never cracked an MVP ballot at all.
Below, the best players in NBA history who were never seen as the league's best by anybody, judged by MVP voting. One caveat: everyone here played from 1980 on, when the media took over the ballot from the players, who tended to treat award voting about as seriously as today's players do… meaning the occasional good-but-not-great guy would pick up a stray first-place vote.
Best MVP voting finishes: 3rd (2018), 5th (2015), 6th (2020), 9th (2017)
Future Hall-of-Famer Anthony Davis entered the NBA with a whole lot of hype, a former No. 1 recruit coming out of high school who won a national championship and Player of the Year honors in an all-time one-and-done season at Kentucky, before being selected first overall by the New Orleans Pelicans in the 2012 draft.
And Davis has lived up to the expectations more or less, earning All-Star honors 10 times (every other player who has made that many All-Star appearances is either in the Hall of Fame, still active or recently retired), making four 1st Team All-NBAs and winning an NBA championship once, in 2019-20, as a member of the Los Angeles Lakers.
But just like Davis is considered one of the best defenders ever without winning Defensive Player of the Year once, he's also one of the best NBA players ever without ever being considered the best player in the league by anybody. Davis has just one Top 3 MVP finish in his career, which came in 2017-18, as a member of the New Orleans Pelicans, when he put up 28.1 points, 11.1 rebounds, 2.3 assists, 1.5 steals and 2.6 blocks per game. Outside of that, Davis has just one other Top 5 finish in the prestigious award's voting.
This tier of players is actually fascinating, in that Davis is a surefire first-ballot Hall-of-Famer, and even so, his career might be seen as just a tad bit disappointing in that he wasn't able to become the best player on a championship team, which many thought would be possible when he came out of college, considering he accomplished just that at Kentucky. He never even got a single first-place MVP vote.
Davis never becoming the guy is kind of disappointing, and can be attributed not only to his trouble staying healthy throughout his career, but also to his lack of developing a reliable three-point shot. His playmaking also left a lot to be desired for a potential No. 1 option, which certainly brought him down a level.
Even so, Davis could draw fouls relatively well, gained strength upon getting to the NBA, was a fantastic, explosive finisher around the basket, was a game-changer on the defensive end and had a strong face-up game from the midrange. All he lacked was even a mediocre three-point shot. We think if he had ever developed that outside shot, he had MVP-level skills everywhere else, besides with his playmaking.
Lakers legend James Worthy was the vital third piece for the Showtime Lakers dynasty of the '80s, crushing foes in transition, as well as with his face-up skills in the halfcourt, thanks to his solid midrange jumper, quick first step and potent driving ability.
Worthy earned All-Star honors every season from 1985-86 through 1991-92, also making two All-NBA teams during that stretch, both as a 3rd Teamer, once in '90 and then again in '91. He even won Finals MVP honors in 1988, no small feat considering he shared the floor with the likes of Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, two of the NBA's 10 best players ever. In that championship series, a historic seven-game victory for L.A. over the Detroit Pistons, Worthy came up huge, averaging 22.0 points, 7.4 rebounds and 4.4 assists per game on 49.2 percent shooting.
Worthy is one of just five players in league history to win Finals MVP but never finish Top 10 in regular-season MVP voting, joining Jaylen Brown (for now), Andre Iguodala, Jo Jo White and Cedric Maxwell on the list, making him an excellent candidate for recognition in this exercise.
Worthy was consistently one of the best players in the NBA during his prime, but he was never close to being an MVP candidate. Maybe, however, he would have gotten more love in that regard if he didn't have to share so much of the ball with two other all-timers in Johnson and Abdul-Jabbar. Playing on a less talented team, Worthy may have been able to show off his ahead-of-their-time skills as a pull-up shooter and driver, as a sort of small-ball 4, before the position became as popular and important as it is today.
Even so, Worthy's resume is extremely impressive, and he rightfully entered the Naismith Hall of Fame with the 2003 class.
A Top 25 scorer in NBA history (23rd, to be exact), Paul Pierce was a fierce bucket-getter in his prime, a player with great size on the wing who could score efficiently from all three levels, thanks to his outside shooting, his pull-up midrange game and his finishing around the basket. Pierce also had slippery ball-handling skills, powered by a smooth crossover, and could hit shots over the toughest of defending.
Pierce parlayed those skills into 10 All-Star appearances, four All-NBA Teams (once a 2nd Teamer) and even a Finals MVP trophy in 2008 when the Big 3 Boston Celtics won the NBA championship that year. In the championship series that year, Pierce put up 21.8 points, 4.5 rebounds and 6.3 assists, to go with 1.2 steals on 39.3 percent shooting from beyond the arc.
Even so, Pierce, perhaps due to fitness-related issues, never maintained that super elite form he showed in the '08 Finals for an entire season, so although he was a great player - a Top 15 to 20 player in the league for many years, in fact - he was never quite in that top rung.
Regardless, Pierce was an all-time great, and his resume clears that of most others in NBA history. We have him nearly as a Top 50 player ever, and with good reason.
Best MVP voting finishes: 4th (2018), 6th (2019), 7th (2021), 8th (2016), 8th (2020)