There were three possible candidates for GOAT before Jordan: Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain and Kareem Abdul Jabar (Lew Alcindor when he entered the league). George Mikan had a claim at the beginning of the league, but his dominance of the 50s (5 championships in a mostly white league) was thoroughly eclipsed by Bill Russell in the 60's (11 championships in an integrate league).

Strictly on a rings basis, Bill Russell has the strongest claim to being the GOAT pre-Jordan (and in fact, Jordan's 6 rings pale in comparison to the 11 that Russell garnered). He anchored the greatest defenses in history, and pioneered post defense. Most of the criticism of him has been based on the fact that he doesn't have the same gaudy statistical numbers of other GOAT-level players, as well as the fact that defense is much harder to attribute to individuals statistically. Blocks (one of the best measures of a center's defensive prowess) were not recorded for Russell's career so his shot blocking prowess is based on the limited television footage available as well as anecdotal evidence.

Here's Red Auerbach on choosing Jordan-Russell 1-2 all time:

"You gotta be realistic," Red Auerbach says. "Listen, everybody knows what I think of Russell. what Rusell did for me. I love Russell. He was the premier shot blocker in the history of the game, and it was more than that with the guy--he was also the premier intimidator. He wasn't just the best rebounder I ever saw; he was the best anticipator. And when he got that ball, he wasn't screwing around with it; he was starting the fast break. He was more interested in winning than anybody I ever saw, he was not a self-promoter, and--you go back and look it up--he was a better scorer than people think. This isn't anything against Russell. Out of all the centers who've ever played, I'd pick him first.

Several times Russell was voted the league MVP while Wilt was voted the center on the All-NBA first team (with Russell on the All-NBA 2nd team). So Wilt was 'better' but Russell was 'more valuable'. The results oriented nature of professional sports means that by the end of their careers Russell was widely regarded by experts within the sport to be the better player. Certainly Russell had the better career.

Wilt Chamberlain was Bill's contemporary and noted rival. The two dueled throughout their careers, with Wilt generally putting up more gaudy individual statistical lines in points and rebounding, while Russell's Celtics came away with the win. Because of the precarious financial position of the league during the era, Wilt was encouraged to fill up arenas with his entertaining play and seeking scoring feats that were good for the bottom line (because teams turned out to watch the star) but not necessarily as good for the teams wins. Wilt changed teams throughout the course of his career and it's notable that the performance of the teams he left did NOT drop off significantly in his absence. When he was traded from the '76ers to the Lakers in 1986, Philly only declined 7 wins from 62 to 55. There's a reason why Wilt never won a ring until his tenth season in the NBA. In 1967 his scoring plummeted do a then-career-low 24.1 ppg (he'd been over 30ppg every prior season). Playing within himself and playing a team game brought him success in a way that individual scoring accolades like his anomalous 50.4ppg, 25.7rpg, 48.5mpg season in '62 (his third season in the league) never did.

The player most now regarded as the GOAT pre-Jordan (because he was still playing at the time) was Kareem Abdul Jabbar. Tremendous longevity, the league leader in scoring, with 6 MVPs, a champion across two decades, and few if any negatives to harp on. Of the 3 centers he was the most 'team independent' in the sense that he didn't need a roster constructed around his specific talents the way players like Wilt, Jordan, Shaq or even LeBron did. Russell needed scorers to pair with his prodigious defensive skills.

Is this question being asked in 1985? Probably the media debate would be fierce and would be considering the matter to be between Bird and Magic, who were the franchise players of the two best and most storied franchises in the NBA. This was when the league was exploding in popularity and these two players led their franchises deep into the playoffs for the whole decade. A lot of media outlets were desperate for Bird (or 'Basketball Jesus' as they called him) to be the best, if only to show that the NBA wasn't dominated by black players. It's hard to avoid racial undercurrents to their player evaluation though, which still contains echoes of the segregation that the earlier generations of players endured. Recency bias is a real thing though, and that's certainly the debate that was gripping newspapers in North America.

This question intrigued me so I perused the newspapers on Newspapers.com to see who came out on top whenever this question was posed.

First off, the question goes back nearly as long as the sport itself. Basketball was invented in 1891, and by 1898, there were already players being called the "greatest of all time". Here's a timeline:

• The Nov 3, 1898, edition of the Trenton Evening Times wrote that Al Bratton of the "Trentons" (sometimes the Trenton Potters) and Sandy Shields of the 23rd Street YMCA(!) (later to become the semi-pro 23rd Street Wanderers) were "the acknowledged two greatest basketball players in the world".

• The Mar 7, 1911, edition of the Harrisburg (PA) Telegraph wrote that Harry Hough of the Pittsburgh South Side team was "the world's greatest basketball player".

• The Dec 11, 1924, edition of the Woodland (CA) Daily Democrat explicitly wrote an article asking the question "Who Is Or Was The Greatest Basketball Player Of All Time?" and the answer they gave was Sandy Esquivel, a then-player for the University of Texas at Austin.

• The NEA news service posed the question to several basketball coaches in January 1929, and the resulting syndicated article ran in several different newspapers. The coaches claimed that Charley Hyatt, who played for the University of Pittsburgh, was the greatest of all time.

• The question was posed by the AP in a Mar 15, 1935, article that ran in many newspapers. Charley Hyatt was mentioned once again, but the article focused on the career of Forrest DeBernardi who had been a star at Westminster College in Missouri before embarking on a successful semi-pro career throughout the 1920s.

• By the mid-1930s, several different articles pondering the greatest basketball player of all time named Dutch Dehnert of the New York Celtics as the greatest. He had played for the team for twenty years by the time the Sheboygan Press claimed him as the greatest in a Dec 23, 1936, article.

• A Jan 9, 1938, article called Hank Liusetti, the All-American forward for Stanford, "Greatest Basketball Player of All Time".

• In the early 1940s, Denhert, Hyatt, and others continued to be referenced occasionally as the greatest, but by the end of that decade, the greatest was routinely said to be George Mikan. A Mar 2, 1949, article quotes New York Knicks coach Joe Lapchick as saying, "Mikan is the greatest all-around basketball player that ever lived, and the highest paid and the highest gate attraction. He's the Ruth, the Dempsey, the Hagen, the Tilden of basketball."

• Mikan continued to be often called the greatest, until the beginning of Wilt Chamberlain's college career. What's remarkable is that there are articles from 1955, when Chamberlain was still only a freshman at the University of Kansas, calling him "the greatest basketball player alive today" including one in the Nov 19, 1955, edition of the Hazelton (PA) Plain Speaker.

• In the Sep 23, 1958, edition of the Decatur (IL) Herald, before Wilt Chamberlain joined the NBA and was playing for the Harlem Globetrotters, he was being called "the greatest basketball player ever".

I'll stop there. Throughout the 1960s, Wilt Chamberlain continued to be called the "greatest ever" in newspaper articles, though other names started to creep in. Most notably, the names of Bill Russell, Jerry West, and Oscar Robertson often came up as rivals.

By the mid-1970s, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had joined them as being referenced as "the greatest of all time".

In 1980, in honor of the NBA's 35th anniversary, they conducted a poll of coaches and former players as to who was the "greatest of all time" and Bill Russell came out on top. The other ten players named to the "all-time team" were Chamberlain, West, Robertson, Abdul-Jabbar, Mikan, Elgin Baylor, Bob Pettit, Julius Erving, John Havlicek, and Bob Cousy.

When Kareem retired in 1989, there were many, many articles about him being the greatest of all time, or at least near the top. The Philadelphia Daily News published a poll of basketball professionals in their Jun 6, 1989, edition of the "greatest centers of all time" and the results were Chamberlain firmly as the best, with Russell at #2, and Abdul-Jabbar a close third. The results were 94 votes to 78.5 to 72.5. Nobody else got more than 3 votes (a tie between Mikan and Bill Walton).

Surprisingly, upon the retirements of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, neither was particularly touted as the greatest. There were many articles saying that each of them should be considered in the conversation, or words to that effect, but nowhere did I find anybody seriously considering either of them the greatest. Note that articles about Magic's retirement focused as much on his health as his basketball career, but also note that the following year, both players were part of the 1992 Olympic "Dream Team" and both were once again mentioned among the greatest of all time but none that explicitly said that they actually were.