SAN FRANCISCO — A swath cutting across all levels of basketball marked the finalists for the 2025 Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame class, along with award winners already selected and announced Friday afternoon at Chase Center.
Marquee names abounded, led by Carmelo Anthony, the 10-time All-Star with the Denver Nuggets and New York Knicks, who scored more than 28,000 points in his 19-year pro career and who won three gold medals as one of the most impactful U.S. men’s Olympians in history. There was also Dwight Howard, who won three straight Defensive Player of the Year awards and was an eight-time All-Star. Marques Johnson, one of the premier small forwards in the game in the 1980s, mostly for the Milwaukee Bucks, was also nominated.
Also nominated by the North American Committee was Buck Williams, a rugged power forward who toiled mainly for the New Jersey Nets and Portland Trail Blazers over 17 seasons, making three All-Star teams. He still ranks third in NBA history in offensive rebounds (4,526) and 16th in total rebounds (13,017). The North American Committee also nominated the 2008 U.S. Men’s Olympic team — the so-called “Redeem Team” led by Kobe Bryant and Dwyane Wade — which re-captured the gold medal in Beijing after the U.S. men’s team settled for bronze in the 2004 Games in Greece.
The women’s game was well-represented by finalists Maya Moore, who won four WNBA championships with the Minnesota Lynx and was the league’s 2014 Most Valuable Player; Sue Bird, who also won four WNBA titles with Seattle, plus five gold medals for the U.S. Women’s Olympic team; Sylvia Fowles, the two-time WNBA finals MVP and two-time champion with the Lynx over 15 seasons; and Jennifer Azzi, the 1990 College Basketball Player of the Year who led Stanford to that year’s national championship, and who was on the celebrated 1996 U.S. Women’s team that won gold in Atlanta. All were nominated by the Women’s Committee.
In addition, “Machine Gun” Molly Bolin, a prolific scorer who starred for a WNBA precursor, the Women’s Professional Basketball League, in the 1980s, was nominated by the Women’s Veteran Committee.
Coaches at all levels were represented: Billy Donovan, who won two national championships at Florida and is the current longtime coach of the Chicago Bulls; Gonzaga’s Mark Few, who turned the Bulldogs from a little-known mid-major into an NCAA powerhouse over the past quarter-century, and who’s closing in on 900 career victories; Jerry Welsh, a Division III legend with nearly 500 career wins at SUNY-Potsdam, including the 1981 national championship; and Dušan Ivković, the architect of the celebrated 1988 Yugoslavia men’s Olympic gold team that featured Vlade Divac, Toni Kukoc and the late Drazen Petrovic.
Longtime NBA referee Danny Crawford, who officiated more than 2,000 games over 32 seasons, including 30 finals games, was also nominated. Miami Heat majority owner Micky Arison, and Tal Brody, who became one of Israel’s most decorated players after starring at the University of Illinois in the mid-60s, were nominated as contributors.
The John R. Bunn Award, the Hall’s single-highest award short of enshrinement in the Hall itself, will be given to the Boston Celtics’ longtime public relations executive, Jeff Twiss, who’s been with the franchise for more than 40 years and has been regarded as one of the great professionals on his side of the player-media divide, all while dealing with the incessant demand for players, coaches and executives with one of the NBA’s marquee franchises.
The Hall named three recipients for this year’s Curt Gowdy Media Award, given annually to print and broadcast honorees of distinction: Michelle Smith, a decorated sportswriter for nearly 30 years, primarily covering women’s basketball for The Athletic, the San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle, WNBA.com, Pac-12.com and Bleacher Report, and who is now a senior contributor for The Next; Clark Kellogg, the lead college basketball analyst for CBS Sports for nearly two decades, after serving as a game analyst for both CBS and the Indiana Pacers; and George Blaha, the longtime play-by-play voice of the Detroit Pistons.
Noted “insider” Adrian Wojnarowski, who is this year’s Gowdy “Insight” Award winner, reimagined the news breaking business in the NBA to become the dominant information person in the industry for Yahoo! Sports and ESPN before suddenly retiring last year to take the general manager job at his alma mater, St. Bonaventure.
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(Photo: Al Bello / Getty Images)
