Basketball’s nuttiest, wildest, craziest players.

When I was a kid my dad used to tell me the reason NBA superstar center Bill Walton, then with the Boston Celtics, got so many foot fractures was because he was a vegetarian. The big redhead, with his long hair, headband, surfer-speak, and reverence for the Grateful Dead, was the closest thing to a hippie in professional sports — and my dad didn’t like hippies. But since he was a Celtics fan, and respected Walton’s talents, he couldn’t bring himself to call Big Red a counterculture dope — which is what he would have called him had Walton done anything else but play for a Boston sports team.

Seventies Red Sox pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee got the same pass, and Lee — like Walton, from California — is arguably the most out-there dude ever to play pro sports. He mastered the eephus pitch — a high-trajectory blooper that drops to the plate like a slow-pitched softball. He played Frisbee with fans sitting near the bullpen. He came onto the field at different times wearing a gas mask, a Daniel Boone hat, a beanie with a propeller. He went to Communist China, grew a long, scraggly beard, and said it wasn’t a Fu Manchu but a “Ho Chi Minh,” naming the Vietnamese revolutionary. He took drugs, and claimed the pot he smoked made him impervious to bus fumes while jogging to Fenway Park.

Every sport has their eccentrics, their weirdos, their rebels, their free spirits. The Red Sox got another good one when Manny Ramirez roamed left field at Fenway, stumbling and rolling after balls, snagging relay throws meant for infielders, and disappearing through a door into the scoreboard booth behind the Green Monster — only to emerge moments before the next pitch. “Manny being Manny” — his hijinks gave rise to a catchphrase.

Football had ex-Redskin Clinton Portis, a dude who created multiple characters for locker-room interviews, sometimes dressing the part, with wig. His alter egos included Coach Janky Spanky, Dolla Bill, Sheriff Gonna-Getchya, and Angel of Southeast Jerome. He said some classic things, like when he remarked of teammate Santana Moss: “Now that he’s gotten over his circumcision, he’s doing a lot better. You can tell by the way he is running.”

Not to forget wide receiver Chad Johnson, who legally changed his name to Ochocinco in 2008, the moniker reflecting his jersey number 85. In 2012, he went back to his birth name, saying he sought reconnection with his former self. He rode a bull, raced a thoroughbred horse, boogied on Dancing with the Stars, and this spring claimed he lived at Bengals stadium in Cincinnati during his first two years in the league. Why? Because he’s cheap — his word. “The stadium had everything,” he tweeted in May. “Shower, players lounge, food & tv.”

But when I think of sports eccentricity supreme, I think basketball. The NBA’s been embracing flamboyance, flash, and kookiness in its stars for decades, as have NBA fans.

Consider Darryl Dawkins, that liberated soul from 40 years ago. Stevie Wonder gave him one of his many nicknames: Chocolate Thunder. Dawkins himself coined Dr. Dunkenstein. After a backboard-shattering slam on Bill Robinzine in ’79, Dawkins dubbed it, “The Chocolate-Thunder-Flying, Robinzine-Crying, Teeth-Shaking, Glass-Breaking, Rump-Roasting, Bun-Toasting, Wham-Bam, Glass-Breaker-I-Am-Jam.” Did we mention he claimed to be an alien from Planet Lovetron, where he practiced “interplanetary funkmanship”?

Here are five more NBA big freaks, all still with us, unlike Dr. Dunkenstein, who’s up in heaven being funky, or maybe a Lovetron version of the great beyond.

No Shaq? Well, it was a tough call. Let’s make him sixth man.

Bill Walton
“Throw it down, big fella!” It’s one of Walton’s signature phrases, his commentary itself an achievement, given that he stuttered when young. He’s as loquacious an announcer ever to blab into a mic. Nonstop musings, tangents, everything amped up verbally — that’s what you get with Big Red. The dude owns a solar-powered teepee, has seen the Grateful Dead more than 850 times, and once spent three minutes talking only about Bob Dylan during a USC-Oregon game. “Tonight’s start was electric,” Walton once declared. “Just both teams riding quasars all the way to the top of the mountain to the promised land!”

Dennis Rodman
One of the greatest rebounders in NBA history, “The Worm” is also a world-class nonconformist — witness his 2013 trip to meet his Supreme Weirdness, Kim jong-Un, the bouffant-haired Elvis-loving North Korean dictator. Pierced and heavily tattooed, Rodman dated Madonna for two months and later married Carmen Electra. In his 1996 memoir Bad As I Wanna Be, he wrote of an epiphany after a suicidal period: “I decided that instead [of killing myself] I was gonna kill the impostor… So I just said, ‘I’m going to live my life the way I want to live it and be happy doing it.’… I killed the person I didn’t want to be.”

Charles Oakley
Oakley’s the wild card here. Thanks to a revealing Sports Illustrated profile in 2000, we learned he’s as unique in his way as the other big, tough, quirky NBA Charles — Barkley. The longtime bachelor and crotchety ex-Knick liked to take extended off-season solo drives, sometimes logging 20,000 total road miles. He owned 200-plus suits. He hated wearing the same threads twice. An owner of Cleveland car washes, Oakley was known to rag-buff a vehicle’s side panel at one of his businesses while dressed in a pricey Italian suit.

“You can’t throw a hook on the side of the road and expect to catch a fish in the grass,” said a guy who once wore lime-green pinstripes with a fedora — this fish quote an example of Oakspeak, as Sports Illustrated called it. Oakley is still grumpy. In recent years he’s been tossed out of both a Vegas casino and Madison Square Garden for alleged misbehavior.

Metta World Peace
Here’s a guy who as a rookie — when still known as Ron Artest — applied for a job at Circuit City for the employee discount, he said. He claimed he drank Hennessy in the Bulls locker room at halftime. He once wore a bathrobe over his Pacers practice uniform to send a “take it easy” message.

The future Metta World Peace received the longest suspension for an on-court incident in NBA history (86 games). During a 1994 Pistons-Pacers brawl, he ran into the stands and later punched a fan on-court. “Lovable Badass” was the name of a 2011 Toronto art show featuring work by 30 artists inspired by Metta’s colossal weirdness. They Call Me Crazy was the name of a proposed reality show starring the then-Laker.

Chris Andersen
Nicknamed Birdman, this self-proclaimed Texas “redneck” who grew up miles from nowhere has tattoos covering 75 percent of his body. Rocking a spiked mohawk when he played for Denver, he developed a cult following. Kids would show up for Nuggets games sporting mohawks and fake ink. One time Andersen curled his blond hair ala Little Orphan Annie. Another time he bought a pit bull puppy on a road trip, named it Red Sonja, and smuggled it along for two more city stops until coaches noticed the pooch on the team bus. In 2006, Andersen received a two-year suspension for a drug test whose specifics weren’t revealed. Birdman’s tattoos? They include a thunderbird on his chest, eagles on his shoulders, crows along both sides of his legs, and “Free Bird” in bright yellow across his neck.

Free bird indeed.