The 5 Players With the Most Heart in the NBA

Valentine’s Day give us a little bit of license to churn out themed content for our readers (never hurts to mix it up a bit). So far today, we’ve given you video propositions and 5 Great NBA Kisses.

Next up? My list of the five players in the NBA with the most heart. As always with these things, my list is my own and there are really no right answers (obviously this will not stop someone in the comments section from telling me that I suck because I left off Tyler Hansbrough or something ridiculous like that). These are the five guys who bring it on the court every single night, no matter the situation. They are the guys who battle through injury and adversity and who would rather die than give in and take an L.

5. Dirk Nowitzki – No, he’s not the most physical player in the NBA, but you don’t have bowl people over like Craig “The Rhino” Smith to have heart. Dirk is a killer. He gets the sh*t beat out of him every single night by defenders who think they can beat him up to get him out of his game and he keeps coming back for more, again and again.

Look no further than last year’s NBA Finals against a Miami Heat team that was more talented and more athletic than Dirk’s Mavs by miles. Given a return to the stage where the Heat had stolen his title a few years prior, there was no way Dirk was going to allow Dallas to lose. He put his team on his back, battled more minutes, scored more points, and pulled more rebounds than he did during the regular season and hit big shot after big shot.

This season he’s struggling a bit, but is still getting after it every night. Even with his struggles, he played this past weekend’s Double OT tilt with the Portland Trail Blazers like it was Game 7.

4. Dwyane Wade – There’s only one player in the NBA who, no matter how badly he’s hurting, refuses to turn off Attack Mode (we’ll get to him later at No. 1) to a greater extent than Dwyane Wade. The way Wade plays – 100 miles per hour and obsessively locked on getting to the rim – will absolutely eventually cost his career games as years and wear and tear take their inevitable toll. No matter – if Wade can physically step on the court, he’s going to try to take it right down the lane every chance he gets, his body and well-being be damned.

3. Kevin Garnett – Can you think of a single professional athlete who takes winning and losing more seriously than KG? I mean, my God, look at how the guy behaves after beating a crappy Orlando Magic team in January. But that’s what makes Garnett so great – there’s no off switch, and everything is life or death on the basketball court. He’s been able to accept the fact that his physical skills are diminishing and then adapt his game so that he’s still one of the most valuable players in the NBA. That adaption and acceptance has meant a lot more warring in the trenches, doing whatever his team needs him to do in order to win. And we’re not even talking about what KG’s training regimen must be like to get himself to a point where he can play like he does every single night 17 years into his career.

2. Kevin Love – Guys who bust their ass to rack up 30-point, 20-rebound games are pretty rare. There’s a reason that Kevin Love is the only guy in the NBA who can pull it off semi-regularly – because it’s incredibly hard to do. There’s a ton of technique and instinct that go into being a good rebounder, and Love clearly has that in spades. What separates Kevin from the rest of the NBA though is the manic desire to go get every single miss, no matter the situation. And he’s willing to mix it up with you to get that loose ball, to the point of losing control in the heat of battle.

1. Kobe Bryant – I don’t care if you hate Kobe, his game, his personality, or anything else about him, but you cannot hate on his heart and desire. Let’s just take a look at what this man is doing 16 seasons into his career: He’s leading the league in scoring at 29.3 ppg and still playing an absurd 38 minutes a game, and he’s doing it all with mangled fingers on his shooting hand, torn ligaments in his shooting wrist, some sort of wild animal’s knee and the blood of a griffin that he had injected in Germany, and who knows how many other injuries that would cripple any other human. It’s just stupid. In fact, I would argue that it’s one of the greatest long-term performances by any player in the history of the NBA.

So how does he do it? It’s not money – he has more than he could possibly spend in multiple lifetimes. Flat out, it’s the desire to compete, to win and to be the best. That’s it. And he’s willing to do whatever it takes to do it.

Honorable Mention:
Kevin Durant
Manu Ginobili
Steve Nash
Derrick Rose
Tony Allen

Who would you out on the list??

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