If you opened a basketball encyclopedia from the late 1970s and looked up "small forward," you would get a description of a role that no longer meaningfully exists. Small forwards in 1977 were the tweener scorers who could not defend centers and were not quick enough to guard the lead ball-handler. Their job was to score from 15 feet, cut off the ball, and rebound the long ones. Julius Erving was the exception to every part of that description. He was also the player who, by being the exception, began to dissolve it.
The five-position system was never precise, but it used to be reasonably informative. A center rebounded and protected the rim. A power forward banged. A small forward did secondary scoring. A shooting guard shot. A point guard ran things. The positions were real because the sets were real: offenses actually had a designated ball handler, a designated post, and a designated wing, and defensively your cross-matches assumed those designations held. Players out of position stuck out. Magic Johnson playing center for one Finals game in 1980 was such a strange event that it is still used as a reference point.
The First Drift: Point Forwards and Stretch Fours
By the late 1980s the system had started loosening in two places. Larry Bird had made the forward-who-can-pass an ordinary sight. Detlef Schrempf and a few others had made the forward-who-can-shoot an ordinary sight. The terms "point forward" and "stretch four" emerged in this window. They were novelties at first, jargon for specific players. Within ten years they were normal descriptions of real lineups.
Scottie Pippen is a useful case. On the 1990s Bulls, Pippen initiated offense, defended the other team's best wing, and switched on to big men when needed. In a 1977 vocabulary he was a small forward who ran point; in a modern vocabulary he is a 6'8" lead ball-handler with plus wing defense. Same player, two eras of labels. Pippen was not a failure of the five-position system. He was an early sign that the system was going to stop fitting.
The Second Drift: Positionless Offense
The second loosening came in the 2000s and sped up after 2010. The Phoenix Suns under Mike D'Antoni showed that a team could run offense with a 6'1" point guard (Steve Nash) initiating every possession and four shooters spacing the floor, including a 6'11" power forward (Amar'e Stoudemire) running pick and rolls. The Warriors under Steve Kerr took this further, using two guards who were each the best-shooting small player in the league as dual lead creators, flanked by wings who could switch onto anyone.
You can still apply position labels to those rosters. The labels will be accurate about height and useful for scouting reports. They will tell you less about the role than they did in 1977. Stephen Curry is a point guard by height and an off-ball shooter by usage; Kevin Durant is a small forward by frame and a center by defensive cross-match in 2017; LeBron James at any given moment is whatever position the possession requires.
Where the Labels Still Work
Centers, as a position, have held up better than the other four. The job of a modern center has changed (you now need to be able to switch out to the perimeter more than you did in 1985), but the base description still fits: the biggest guy on the floor, primary responsibility for rim protection and defensive rebounding, usually finishes more than he creates. Shaquille O'Neal in 2001 and Nikola Jokić in 2023 are doing different versions of the job, but they are doing the job.
Point guards have also held up, at least partially. The role has become more shooting-heavy and less pass-first, but someone on every team is still the primary initiator of offense, and that person is still, most often, called the point guard. Magic Johnson's passing-first template gave way to Isiah Thomas and Stockton's scoring-plus-passing template, which gave way to Curry and Dame's shooting-first template. Along that arc the responsibilities shift, but the role stays in the same structural place.
What This Means for the Hall of Fame List
The 30 players on this site span a period in which the meaning of their own position labels has been rewritten twice under them. When we say Julius Erving was a small forward and Kevin Durant is a small forward, the label is doing different work in each case. Dr. J was a scoring wing in a system where that role was well-defined; Durant is a 6'11" primary scorer whose position label is a rough stand-in for his height.
This is not a complaint about the labels. It is an invitation to use them lightly. Reading the position on a modern player profile should tell you something; reading it alone is no longer enough to say what the player did on the floor.