First, rest assured, the headline does NOT commit us to slogging through the careers of Danny Ainge, Mark Hendrickson, Dave DeBusschere and Ron Reed, though the latter two will get further mention for reasons unrelated to what you might expect.
Many regular Bauxites may not be aware, since legitimate NBA basketball comes to Toronto so infrequently, but there's a little series going on in Texas and Michigan right now called "The NBA Finals." In honour of that annual reminder that good defense almost always really does beat good offense, at least in hoops, we examine the possibilities of a Baseball Hall of Names paying homage to the greatest players of The Association.
But how to do this? Originally, I thought to compare the list of men in the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY with the list of those enshrined in the Hoop Hall in Springfield, Mass., but there are 258 men in the former and, coincidentally enough, 258 men (and women) in the latter, and that seemed an onerously large number of names for very little return -- the occasional David and Brooks/Jackie/Frank Robinson, the intermittent Magic and Walter/Judy/(eventually Randy) Johnson.
So what to do?
