For only the third time, the NBA Finals will feature seven players who made the All-Star team in the same season.
In ESPN.com's preseason #NBArank, the NBA's top three players were LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant. A tier or two below were Draymond Green (14th), Kyrie Irving (15th) and Klay Thompson (16th) clustered closely together with Kevin Love (28th) not far behind them.
All seven made the All-Star team and with the seemingly inevitable rubber match now officially set, it raises the question: Is this the most star-studded Finals matchup in NBA history?
To find out, let's rank the top 10.
An important caveat here: There is admittedly no perfect method to define and rank collective star power. Is the 2004 Pistons team with Chauncey Billups, Ben Wallace, Richard Hamilton and Rasheed Wallace -- four really good and at times All-Star caliber players -- more or less starry than the 2007 Cavaliers led by one uber-star in LeBron James and not much else? Reasonable minds can differ.
Due to the nature of that slippery slope, we limited our scope to the 35 Finals matchups to feature at least five All-Stars from that season. It kicks to the curb a few juicy pairings from seasons with questionable All-Star omissions (such as the 2008 matchup between the Lakers and Celtics, as Pau Gasol was not an All-Star that season) as well as others in which star players missed chunks during the regular season only to return for the playoffs (such as 1998, when Scottie Pippen and John Stockton were not named All-Stars due to missed games). But when drilling down among the best of the best, a line had to be drawn somewhere, and five All-Star selections seemed natural.
From there, we took all of the player efficiency ratings (PER) from the regular season for the All-Stars in the NBA Finals and simply added them up to come up with what we'll call "Collective Star-Studded Rating." (We're using PER because metrics like real plus-minus only go back as far as there is play-by-play data). For years in which the same group of players showed up multiple times (like Celtics-Lakers), we went with whichever year was better. A list in which the same matchups show up more than once isn't as fun.
All right, enough process -- on to the rankings.
10. 1973 Knicks def. Lakers
9. 1952 Lakers def. Knicks
8. 1956 Warriors def. Pistons
7. 2013 Heat def. Spurs
6. 2012 Heat def. Thunder
5. 1960 Celtics def. Hawks
4. 1987 Lakers def. Celtics
3. 1983 Sixers def. Lakers
2. 1962 Celtics def. Lakers
1. 2017 Warriors vs. Cavaliers