Alright, let me tell you about my little data-diving adventure to find the NBA player with the highest winning percentage. It was a fun rabbit hole, I gotta say.
First off, I started with the obvious: Google. Typed in “highest winning percentage nba player” and bam! Got a bunch of articles mentioning Magic Johnson. Seemed legit, given his rep and all those championships. But I’m not one to just take someone else’s word for it. I needed to see the numbers myself.
So, I went searching for NBA stats databases. Found a couple of decent ones, but the real gold was on *. That site is a treasure trove, seriously. I started digging through their player stats, trying to figure out how to sort everyone by winning percentage. It wasn’t immediately obvious, but I messed around with the filters and column options until I found what I needed.
Here’s where it got a bit tedious. I exported the data into a CSV file. Opened that sucker up in Excel. Yeah, Excel. Don’t judge. It’s what I had handy. Then I started cleaning the data. Some players had incomplete seasons, some had very few games played overall. I needed to set some minimum thresholds to make sure I was looking at players with significant careers.
I decided to filter out anyone who hadn’t played at least 500 games. Felt like a reasonable cutoff. Then, I sorted the remaining players by winning percentage, highest to lowest. And there he was… Magic Johnson, sitting right at the top.
The dude really did have an insane win rate. It was something like .740, meaning he won roughly 74% of the games he played in. Crazy! But hey, five rings don’t lie. He was a winner, plain and simple.
I double-checked my work, just to be sure. Went back to Basketball-Reference, cross-referenced with other sources. Yep, everything lined up. Magic Johnson, the man with the golden touch, also had the highest winning percentage in NBA history. Pretty cool to see it confirmed by the data myself!
It wasn’t rocket science, just a bit of data wrangling and good ol’ fashioned internet research. But it’s always satisfying to verify these things for yourself. Plus, it gave me a newfound appreciation for Magic’s dominance. The guy was a straight-up legend.
- Googled the question.
- Found *
- Exported data to CSV.
- Cleaned the data in Excel.
- Filtered by games played (minimum 500).
- Sorted by winning percentage.
- Verified the results with multiple sources.
Final Result
Magic Johnson has the highest winning percentage in NBA history.
