I haven't looked into what the criteria is here for ranking, but am just going to do this thought exercise to see where this comes out (I have no agenda). One thing I'd look at is impact and how longevity plays in. For instance, guys like Wes Matthews or Gordan Giricek or Rodney Hood were better individual players, could you make that argument taking the larger picture of tenure into account? That's obviously debatable, but I'm going to leave off really short-term people unless their impact in a season or two was really strong. I'm just going to run through last year's roster and go backwards and see if/when I hit 27.
1. Lauri.
2. Conley.
3. Clarkson.
4. Bogdanovic.
5. Gobert.
6. Mitchell.
7. Ingles.
8. Favors.
9. Hayward.
10. George Hill (debatable).
11. Al Jefferson.
12. Paul Millsap.
13. Andrei Kirilenko.
14. Deron Williams.
15. Carlos Boozer.
16. Memo.
17. Matt Harpring.
18. Karl Malone.
19. John Stockton.
20. Donyell Marshall.
21. Bryon Russell.
22. Jeff Hornacek.
23. David Benoit (?).
24. Jeff Malone.
25. Mark Eaton.
26. Thurl Bailey.
27. Darrell Griffith.
28. Ricky Green.
29. Adrian Dantley.
Okay, I'm tired. I went back to 83-84 for this list. There were several guys that you would obviously say are better (not to any major degree), but they just really didn't have much tenure to be able to throw them on the list. Overall, if I went through this in more detail, I'd imagine I could add more people. I was trying to be quite conservative. Maybe I don't rank Ostertag at 27, but what I learned after looking at all the rosters is that this is certainly within a range of reasonability, even if much higher than anticipated. What would help would be some specific criteria.