There are six NBA players who made six or more All-Star teams but have not been inducted into the Hall of Fame despite being eligible. Larry Foust has the most as his 8 All-Star appearances were not enough to get him inducted to the Hall. Five players are tied with 6 All-Star appearances but no Hall of Fame induction including Shawn Kemp, Jermaine O’Neal, and Amar’e Stoudemire.
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The 15 Players Who Made the Most NBA All-Star Teams Without Making the Hall of Fame
The list below includes those eligible for the Hall of Fame but who have not been inducted. The number beside each player indicates their number of All Star appearances.
The list does not include the many active players who have played in five or more All-Star games but haven’t been inducted into the Hall of Fame because they are not yet eligible.
Similarly, it does not include recently retired players who played more than five All-Star games but have not been inducted because they too are not yet eligible. Players must be retired for four seasons before becoming eligible.
I’d like to add that I wrote this post because I was looking for this information and could not easily find it online. I hope it helps you!
- Larry Foust 8
- Walter Davis 6
- Jimmy Jones 6
- Shawn Kemp 6
- Jermaine O’Neal 6
- Amar’e Stoudemire 6
- Brad Daugherty 5
- Donnie Freeman 5
- Marques Johnson 5
- Larry Kenon 5
- Rudy LaRusso 5
- Don Ohl 5
- Gene Shue 5
- Ralph Simpson 5
- Rudy Tomjanovich 5
Larry Foust: 8 All-Star Games
Foust played 12 seasons as a 6’9’ center for the Fort Wayne Pistons, Minneapolis Lakers and St. Louis Hawks from 1950-1962.
It’s really hard to figure out why Larry Foust has not made the Hall of Fame. The man made 8 All-Star games and was a two-time All-NBA selection including 1st team in 1954-1955.
To give you an indication of how different the NBA was then, Foust might be most famous for scoring the winning basket in the lowest scoring NBA game in history. His Pistons defeated George Mikan’s Lakers 19-18 in the game that led to the introduction of the shot clock.
Even in an insanely different era, Foust scored 14 points and grabbed 10 rebounds per game for his career. He never won a title, but it’s still hard to understand his lack of Hall of Fame recognition.
Basketball Reference has a fun stat called Hall of Fame probability. They explain the complicated formula here, but they basically use the characteristics voters seem to use as criteria and then calculate a player’s chances of induction.
Larry Foust has easily the highest Hall of Fame probability on this list. His .9420 probability is higher than MANY people already long-since inducted into the Hall including Big Game James Worthy , The Worm Dennis Rodman, and Mo Cheeks.
Walter Davis: 6 All-Star Games
Walter Davis only has a Hall of Fame probability of .3089, which puts him much lower than Larry Foust. But it puts him in a near-tie with Knick Killer Reggie Miller who has already been inducted.
And it puts Davis ahead of many other inductees including K.C. Jones, Chris Webber and Pete Maravich to name three.
Davis, a 6’6” wing, played 15 years in the NBA, mostly for the Phoenix Suns. He scored 19 points, dished out nearly 4 assists and grabbed 3 rebounds per game for his career. He was the Rookie of the Year in 1978 and made two All-NBA teams in 1978 & 1979.
His Hall of Fame candidacy is no doubt hurt by the drug scandals he was involved in. Davis went to rehab for cocaine addiction twice in the 1980s.
The league faced widespread drug scandals in the 70s and 80s and players associated with drugs were punished harshly to send a strong message.
The view of addicts as people suffering from a disease was not yet common. The court of public opinion strongly condemned any use of drugs by players.
In 1987, Davis ended up testifying against teammates in exchange for immunity. Those teammates did not end up on trial, but the damage was done. Davis was not re-signed by the Suns and went on to play for several other teams.
Davis retired as the Suns all-time leading scorer and he mended fences enough by 1994 to have his number retired by the franchise.
Jimmy Jones: 6 All-Star Games
Jimmy Jones was a 6’4” guard who played 10 seasons mostly in the ABA. I love the ABA – check out my ABA articles here. But the fact that all of Jones’ All-Star games came in the ABA makes me think I should put an asterisk next to his name (especially since the name of the article is NBA players who…).
Jones made All-Star games playing for the New Orleans Buccaneers, Memphis Pros and Utah Stars. He did go on to play three seasons for the then-Washington Bullets.
Jones has nice numbers: he scored 16 points, grabbed 4 rebounds and dished out 4 assists per game for his career. But his numbers fell off a cliff when he joined the NBA and that must hurt his Hall of Fame chances.
Jones made the All-Time All-ABA team. For those that don’t know, the ABA was no joke. That All-Time team is littered with Hall of Famer like Dr. J, Moses Malone and George Gervin.
But Jones’ career did not quite measure up to those all-time greats. He seems unlikely to make the Hall of Fame.
Shawn Kemp: 6 All-Star Games
Shawn Kemp, a 6’10” forward, played 14 seasons and averaged just about 14.5 points and 8.5 rebounds per game. He was one of, if not THE, best in-game dunkers of all time.
I have written extensively about the ReignMan including his Hall of Fame chances here. In that article I explained that Kemp’s career falls just below the line for the Hall of Fame. He could still get in, but it’s certainly a close call.
Kemp’s Hall of Fame probability is .3845, slightly ahead of Walter Davis. That puts Kemp well ahead of many Hall of Famers.
But Kemp’s candidacy is hurt by multiple factors. First, he never won a championship. Kemp’s numbers are close enough that if he had won a title, he’d probably get the nod.
Second, Kemp’s drug and alcohol addiction cost him quite a few productive years in the NBA. By his late twenties, he was a shell of his former self, playing close to 300 pounds at times and missing time for rehab stints.
Rather than the moralistic judgment of prior eras, I see voters of today’s world punishing Kemp not because he was a drug abuser but because that lifestyle kept him from playing enough productive basketball to make the Hall of Fame.
Kemp’s last three years were statistically horrible and the three years before that in Cleveland he was a shell of his former self despite putting up decent counting stats.
Those wasted years likely cost him him the Hall of Fame.
Jermaine O’Neal 6 All-Star Games
I just wrote an article about O’Neal’s Hall of Fame chances here. In it, I came to the conclusion that he won’t make it.
O’Neal was a 6’10” forward/center who played 18 NBA seasons and averaged 13 points and 8 rebounds per game.
He has a Hall of Fame probability of .3180, which is really good. It puts him below Kemp but ahead of Reggie Miller, Chris Webber and others who are in the Hall.
And yet, I don’t think he should make it. O’Neal had a very slow start to his career in Portland, where he was a non-contributor in his first four seasons after coming straight to the NBA from high school.
He then had really good prime years for the Indiana Pacers. But it was only 8 good years. After that, O’Neal became a journeyman backup.
I like his game, but I think he is in the category of a good player who falls just short of great.
Jermaine O’Neal never won a title or made the NBA Finals and was only a legitimate candidate for the All-Star game in seven seasons of his long career. He just happened to make it in six of them.
I would certainly take Shawn Kemp ahead of Jermaine O’Neal for the Hall of Fame. Kemp was the more dynamic and impactful player in my opinion.
Amar’e Stoudemire 6 All-Star Games
I watched Amar’e Stoudemire play. Based on my own recollections, my instinct is to say that he, like Shawn Kemp and Jermaine O’Neal, is a big man who falls just shy of Hall of Fame consideration.
The voters seem to agree with me: he has been eligible for several years now and has not gotten in yet.
But the numbers are not so sure: Stoudemire’s Hall of Fame probability is .7293!
That puts him 2nd on this list. It puts him ahead of Wes Unseld, Artis Gilmore, Ben Wallace and Chris Mullin who are all, unsurprisingly, in the Hall of Fame.
Amar’e, a 6’10” athletic big forward, played 15 NBA seasons. In addition to the six All-Star games, he made 5 All-NBA teams including one 1st team and was the Rookie of the Year in 2003.
Stoudemire’s career fell off a cliff after his age 28 season, his first in New York when he was a dominant force. That year he played 78 games and scored 25 points per game for the Knicks.
After that, he played more than 55 games only twice in seven seasons. Injuries were what did him in, and he could rarely stay healthy for the rest of his career.
If I had to guess, I’d say Stoudemire someday gets into the Hall of Fame, but for now he is one of the players with the most all star games that is not in.
Brad Daugherty 5 All-Star Games
Brad Daugherty, a 7’0” center, had some great years playing for the Cleveland Cavaliers alongside another Hall of Fame snub: Mark Price.
Daugherty’s .1588 Hall of Fame probability puts him much lower than players like Kemp and Stoudemire.
It still puts him ahead of Chris Webber who got in recently. Dougherty’s Hall of Fame chances are hurt considerably by the fact that he only played 8 seasons.
He averaged 19 points and nearly 10 rebounds per game for those fun Cavs teams. But he and Price could not get past Jordan’s Bulls, so they never won a title or even got to the Finals.
In addition to his 5 All-Star Games made the 1992 All-NBA 3rd team.
Many players similar to Daugherty, who rely more on size and skill than pure athleticism, have long careers. It is too bad for him that a back injury crippled his career so young.
If his career had lasted for fifteen or twenty years, he would almost certainly be in the Hall of Fame.
Donnie Freeman: 5 All-Star Games
Like Jimmy Jones, Donnie Freeman is another ABA asterisk player. He played only one season in the NBA – his last.
All of Freeman’s All-Star appearances were in the ABA. Freeman, a 6’3” guard, played 8 seasons in the ABA and one for the Lakers in the NBA.
He averaged 19 points, 3.5 assists and 3.5 rebounds per game for his career.
Freeman made All-Star teams in his first five year in the ABA playing for the Minnesota Muskies, the Miami Floridians, the Utah Stars, and the Texas/Dallas Chaparrals.
He won a title with the Stars and was named to the All-Time All-ABA team.
Donnie Freeman had a nice, relatively brief, career mostly in the ABA. His Hall of Fame chances seem fairly slim.
Marques Johnson 5 All-Star Games
Marques Johnson was a 6’7” wing who played 11 seasons in the NBA after a strong college career at UCLA.
Johnson has great career stats: he averaged 20 points, 7 boards and 3.6 assists per game. In addition to his five All-Star appearances, Johnson made 3 All-NBA teams including 1st team in 1979.
Johnson never won a title but he led the Bucks to the Eastern Conference Finals in 1983 and 1984. The Bucks eventually retired his number in 2019.
Johnson finished his career with three seasons playing for the hapless Clippers in LA. The Clippers were a joke of a franchise at that point who had almost no chance at winning.
A neck injury robbed him of his career at the age of 30. He attempted a comeback with Golden State two years later, but did not find much success and retired again for good.
Johnson’s Hall of Fame probability is .251 – not amazing but pretty decent and higher than a number of Hall of Famers.
It seems to me that Marques Johnson is a strong candidate to someday get into Springfield. He played 7 seasons in Milwaukee and made 5 All-Star teams and was All-NBA three times.
He was then traded to a god-awful Clippers organization where he continued to put up good numbers for three years before an injury robbed him of his career.
He also can claim a college national championship and multiple college national player of the year awards as a senior at UCLA. He deserves a stronger look in my opinion. Until then, he remains on this list!
Larry Kenon 5 All-Star Games
Larrh Kenon is another ABA asterisk player. The 6’9” forward led his Memphis State team to the national title game in college, where they lost to Bill Walton and the UCLA Bruins.
He made 5 All-Star games, but three were in his first three seasons of professional basketball, which were played in the ABA.
Kenon made two ABA All-Star teams for the New York Nets, with whom he won a title his rookie year, and one more for the San Antonio Spurs – then playing in the last ABA season.
He moved over to the NBA with the Spurs and continued to fill it up. He was Robin to George Gervin’s Batman.
Kenon scored more than 20 points per game each of his first four NBA seasons and averaged around 10 boards per game as well. . He made two more All-Star games in those years as well, this time in the NBA.
At that point, Kenon looked like a very strong Hall of Fame candidate, but his career fell off a cliff. He was traded to the Chicago Bulls after his fourth NBA season.
He had one decent season for the Bulls, scoring 14 and grabbing 5 rebounds per game. He then had a statistically bad season, kicked around the league for one more year after it and was out of basketball by age 30.
He does not appear on the list of top 250 probable candidates for making the Hall of Fame, and it seems very unlikely he will.
Rudy LaRusso 5 All-Star Games
Rudy LaRusso was a forward who played ten years in the NBA in the 1960s. He averaged 15.5 and about 9.5 rebounds per game for his career playing for the Laker and Warriors.
LaRusso was known for his defense: he made the first ever All-NBA Defensive team in 1968-1969. That was his last year in the league. It sure seems likely he would have made All-Defense earlier in his career if it had existed.
His Hall of Fame probability is .0663. That number puts him lower than some of the other leading players on this list, but still ahead of some other players who have made the Hall.
Working in LaRusso’s favor is the fact that defense is hard to quantify, and was even harder to quantify in the 1960s. Some of the stats that help more offensive players do not help him as much.
It is at least possible LaRusso gets in some day through the veteran’s committee. Until then, he stays on the list.
Don Ohl 5 All-Star Games
Don Ohl was a 6’3” guard who also played in the 1960s. Ohl’s Hall of Fame probability is lower than LaRusso’s: .0278.
Ohl moved around the league some in his ten-year career. He played for the Pistons, Baltimore Bullets and St. Louis/Atlanta Hawks.
Ohl averaged just about 16 points, 3 rebounds and 3 assists per game for his career. He made his five All-Star appearances in his prime years from 26-30. During those seasons his numbers peaked with a high of around 20 points per game.
Ohl’s finest hour was the 1965 playoffs in which his Bullets team lost the West (Baltimore was somehow in the West?) Finals to a Jerry West-led Lakers squad. Ohl averaged 28 points per game in the six game series vs the Lakers.
Ohl does not have a particularly compelling Hall of Fame case. I would imagine he’d have a veteran’s committee chance like some of the other players on this list.
Gene Shue 5 All-Star Games
Gentleman Gene Shue was a pioneer of the NBA game, playing from 1954-1964. He played for several teams, most notably the Fort Wayne/Detroit Pistons and the New York Knicks.
Shue was a 6’2” guard who averaged 14 points, 4 rebounds and 4 assists per game for his 10-year NBA career.
He made five straight All-Star games from 1958-1962. He also made All-NBA first team in 1960 and the 2nd team in 1961.
Shue was known as a dynamic guard who played strong defense, was a good dribbler and invented the spin move.
His Hall of Fame probability is fairly high at .2184. That number puts him ahead of players like Billy Cunningham, Earl Monroe, and Chris Webber.
Not only did Shue have a pretty strong career as a player, he went on to coach in the NBA for more than twenty years.
I am surprised Gene Shue is not in the Hall of Fame, and I will not be surprised at all if the veteran’s committee inducts him at some point.
Ralph Simpson 5 All-Star Games
First off, this is not who you think it is – it is not a typo. Ralph SIMPSON made 5 All-Star games. Ralph Sampson only made 4 – and he is already in the Hall of Fame, mostly based on his college exploits.
Ralph Simpson is another ABA asterisk player. The 6’5” guard played 10 seasons of professional basketball overall with four of them in the NBA.
But his first six seasons were in the ABA and that is where all his All-Star appearances happened.
Simpson played all six ABA seasons in Denver – first when they were the Rockets and later as they became the Nuggets.
He made All-Star teams in his 2nd -6th seasons in the league. He averaged 17 points, 4 rebounds and 3 assists per game for his combined ABA/NBA career.
Simpson’s Hall of Fame chances are low due to the fact that his numbers cratered when he moved from the ABA to the NBA.
His scoring dropped from 18 per game in his last ABA season to 11 in his first NBA one. It got worse from there.
One of the most interesting facts about Simpson is that his daughter is Grammy-Award-Winning singer India Arie.
Rudy Tomjanovich 5 All-Star Games
Rudy Tomjanovich is another asterisk player – but not because of time in the ABA. The issue for Rudy T is that he is in the Hall of Fame.
But he made it as a coach, not as a player. Players are eligible for Hall of Fame induction in their fifth year after retirement. Rudy retired from playing in 1981 and was not inducted as a coach until 2020.
It’s clear he had a shot as a player and never got in. As a player, Tomjanovich was a 6’8” forward who averaged 17 points and 8 rebounds per game in an 11-year career.
After getting off to a slow start in San Diego, Tomjanovich made his mark in Houston where he became a 25 point-per-game scorer as a 25-year-old in his first All-Star season.
He would make four more All-Star teams in his next five seasons in Houston. His Hall of Fame probability is really high: .2983. That is ahead of K.C. Jones, Frank Ramsey and others in the Hall.
He may have gotten real veteran’s committee support if not for the fact that his coaching career led him to the Hall.
As a coach, Tomjanovich won two titles in Houston coaching the Dream, Clyde Drexler, and Robert Horry among other greats.
Summary: NBA Players Who Made the Most All-Star Games Without Making the Hall of Fame.
Larry Foust made the most All-Star games of anyone in NBA history who has not made the Hall of Fame with eight appearances. Several other players have made five or more All-Star games but still have not made the Hall of Fame. Some of the bigger names on the list include Amar’e Stoudemire, Shawn Kemp and Jermaine O’Neal.
I have been a Boston sports fan for more than forty years. I write about games, players and seasons from the past.