Long before setting the (since-broken) NBA record for career three-pointers with the Indiana Pacers, Reggie Miller honed his shooting stroke as a high schooler in the greater Los Angeles area. He is arguably the greatest basketball player from the region, but there are quite a few active phenoms coming for that crown.
Apologies in advance if we include someone you think shouldn't be or vice versa. Interpretations of both "from" and "Los Angeles" can vary from one person to another. And I have yet to step foot in the state of California in my life, so I'm hardly an expert on its geography. As a general rule of thumb, though, we're searching for guys who played multiple years of high school basketball in one of the many cities that Crunchbase denotes as part of the greater Los Angeles area.
To further clarify, here are the most noteworthy products of California who were omitted for not hailing from Los Angeles: Bill Russell, Gary Payton, Paul Silas and Damian Lillard are all from Oakland, which is about 400 miles up the coast from L.A. Jason Kidd (Alameda), Kevin Johnson (Sacramento), Bill Sharman (Porterville) and Jamaal Wilkes (Santa Barbara) also missed the cut for growing up outside of L.A.'s ill-defined boundary lines.
Also worth noting: Kevin Love was born in Santa Monica, California, but he grew up and played high school ball in Oregon.
Even without including those NBA greats, there was no shortage of options. Byron Scott scored more than 15,000 career points. Trevor Ariza, Elden Campbell and Tayshaun Prince each eclipsed 10k in that category, and Prince was one of the best defensive players of the 2000s. Not one of those four players was anywhere close to cracking the top eight. The list could have been twice that long and they still all probably would have been left out.
L.A. isn't quite as loaded as NYC, but it sure has produced a ton of talent.
Players were ranked in ascending order of dominance in the NBA. It's not necessarily a ranking of career win shares, but that Basketball Reference statistic was the one primarily considered.
