Ranking the NBA’s Top 100 Players, Part 3: Stars You Should Win With
Outside the inner circle of NBA superstars lies this tier of players, who can reliably get you a playoff spot with any reasonable supporting cast. Almost every player here has been on the inner-circle, could get there, or seemed poised to at one point. But the NBA is a difficult thing where 96.7% of people fail in their goal every year. Not everyone transcends, but everyone here has at least had moments of transcendence.
7. Kevin Durant, SF, Phoenix Suns
8. Jimmy Butler, SF, Miami Heat
As we head further down the list, the tiers are going to get bigger, the amount I say about each player is going to shrink, and I’m going to start talking about players together. To start, we have two players whose Venn Diagram overlaps mainly only in the area of not caring what others think of them. Aside from that, their games work in opposite directions. Durant’s game starts with the jump shot: fluid, soft, consistent. He again led the league in midrange scoring. Butler’s game ends with the jump shot. He starts by feeling his defender, sizing them up physically, and finding a path through or over them. Once he’s driven to the basket, gotten fouled a couple of times, and gotten a good lather going, then he begins to hoist from further away, expanding his effectiveness and overpowering his opposition. Durant warms up from outside and, once you’re hellbent on contesting, closes in the walls around you as he gets to the rim and chokes you out.
Durant’s Suns had a disappointing end to their season, but at some level, you have to believe they knew up and down the roster that the best hope for a championship run would be after an offseason to build around the Durant-Booker pairing. They did so by adding Bradley Beal, an undersized shooting guard who can score, score, score. The combination is a whole puzzle, but you have to believe there’s a vision being executed. While Durant is the highest ranking Sun on this list, he won’t be the central focus of the team. That will be Booker, and Durant will do what he does best: complement others. It’s a role Durant has played well, and one he seemed to want to return to after being the centerpiece in Brooklyn. Durant wants to be seen as “one of the guys.” Well, in Phoenix, by virtue of surrounding himself with two of the few dozen people on Earth who can relate to being nearly as good at shooting a basketball as Durant can, he has kind of achieved that. It’s an unorthodox path he’s taken in his career, and Phoenix is perhaps the least orthodox stop in his career, and the roster construction is quite unorthodox. And as much as Durant would insist he doesn’t need to win titles to secure his legacy as one of the greatest scorers and best players of all time in the sport, it sure would help if he had titles to talk about other than the time he fled to the best team in the history of the sport.
Butler is one of the few players on this list whose team can be pleased with how they ended the season, only they’re the Miami Heat, so they won’t be. #HEATculture. Butler himself has said he doesn’t play to win the Eastern Conference Championship, he plays to win the whole thing. And while Miami’s ending wasn’t disappointing on a team level, Butler’s performance in the Finals was certainly a disappointment personally. Irrespective of whether it was the ankle he sprained in the conference semifinals that caused a lull in Butler’s production, or the mere weariness of struggling through an entire NBA postseason, it was disappointing to see Butler not able to pull out his best stuff on the biggest stage. Since getting to Miami, a place that respects him, Butler has made the conference finals three out of four seasons, making the Finals two out of those three times. He has eliminated Giannis Antetokounmpo’s Bucks teams twice, Embiid’s 76ers once, and Tatum’s Celtics twice in that span. While those three squads have been the presumptive favorites of the past four seasons, Miami has won the most postseason series, with eight (Boston seven, Milwaukee six, Philadelphia four). Butler has been the dominating force on those teams offensively, and has been the heart and soul of Heat culture. He works hard, doesn’t care what you think, and will beat you and son you. Ask Jrue Holiday.
Despite a major parity in approaches, Durant, who would sooner kill you than touch you, and Butler, who will finish you with your guts in his hands, are both dynamic forces that just about qualify as title contention. However, with Durant’s inability to win as a lead dog, his inability to be the star of the team and need to be a peer, and his seeming unwillingness to attack the paint in the postseason, he’s simply not the player he was when two years ago he was the unanimous answer for Best Player in the World. And Butler has missed opportunities to rise above this tier and into Tier 1, where he deeply believes he should be. Choosing to shoot a three rather than drive at Al Horford for a game-tying layup in 2022 was such a moment, and his inability to hit 30 points in these Finals is another. It makes it clear both players need other guys to get them where they want to go.
9. Devin Booker, SG, Phoenix Suns
10. LeBron James, SF, Los Angeles Lakers
Down 3–0 to the Denver Nuggets, LeBron James came out and lit it up, scoring 30 points in the first half to put the fear of a basketball god into a Nuggets team that had to be feeling quite comfortable holding a virtually insurmountable series lead. That guy is 38. In the second half of that game, James faltered, adding just 10 more and failing to score or force a foul on a desperation drive at the end of the game. That guy is 38. James is still capable of doing the things he’s been doing his whole career. He no longer seems capable of sustaining that level of play long enough to win titles as a team’s best player. Overall, it is still an incredibly graceful descent from the heights of Prime LeBron that skewed expectations beyond what’s reasonable.
Both Book and LeBron had “negative” years, despite James playing at a level perhaps never seen before by anyone his age (excepting maybe the man he passed for the league’s all-time scoring title) and Booker continuing to assert himself as no longer the future of the shooting guard position in the NBA, but the present. Booker will be 27 in October, an age where he can comfortably start being held accountable. He’s a primary figurehead of what will quite possibly be the NBA’s last superteam, and the era of excusing shortcomings is over. When Book first arrived, the Suns were woefully unrounded, and Booker was criticized as being an empty calorie scorer. The Suns hired Monty Williams and signed Chris Paul, and quickly became a formidable beast. As quickly as they ascended, all the way to a commanding 2–0 lead in the 2021 NBA Finals, things in Phoenix soured. They were overpowered by Milwaukee, and when they returned to the playoffs the following year, they were completely undone by Luka Doncic and the Dallas Mavericks in a Game Seven implosion. After barely hanging on to core contributor DeAndre Ayton through a tenuous restricted free agency, the Suns lost starter Jae Crowder to disgruntlement, and traded away Mikal Bridges and Cam Johnson to land Kevin Durant. An era of promise razed to create an era of expectation. The Suns’ could have leaned into the core of Booker, Ayton, Bridges, and Johnson and grown and evolved together. Durant is a shiny object, however, and new owners like Suns owner Mat Ishbia tend to chase shiny objects. On paper, turning Paul, Bridges, and Johnson into Durant and Beal should be a net positive. Only reality always out-complicates paper. Figuring out how to weave together those three fairly similar skillsets, and keep Ayton happy, and find amid the salvage materials a supporting cast that provides the intangible gusto any championship run requires — is going to be tough. Booker will get no breaks, though. If this doesn’t work, it is probably still Durant’s failing mostly, but Booker’s secondarily. If new head coach Frank Vogel can’t put the pieces together correctly, it is Booker’s legacy more than Vogel’s that will suffer.
11. Damian Lillard, PG, Portland Trail Blazers(?)
Damian Lillard is the oldest 33-year-old on the planet. Stephen Curry, who is two years older than Lillard, does not get talked about as someone who is too old to pair with young players. When LeBron James was Lillard’s age, he took his team to the Finals (for what was the fourth straight season) and got flayed by the Durant Warriors for the second straight year, basically by himself. Chris Paul made an All-NBA team at four years older than what Lillard is now. Yet, Lillard keeps being talked about as though he is 36, the age he will be by the end of his contract. First the question was whether Lillard could wait around for the development of Shaedon Sharpe and Anfernee Simons to strengthen the Blazers’ core, then it was the same question with Scoot Henderson. Now, it is “who wants to add an aging Damian Lillard to their core?” when the focus should be on one of the game’s very best players — of all time let alone right now — being available for trade for the first time in his career.
Lillard finally let go of his loyalty shtick when he asked for a trade. He had built his reputation on being loyal to the team that selected him and subsequently invested in him, to the fans that devoted themselves to him, and even as the writing on the wall got more and more legible, Lillard stayed true to himself, to the grind, to believing idealistically that NBA teams are made equal and any team that had Dame Lillard on it was going to win a chip eventually. Then they signed him up for another year of development, of “co-stars” that don’t move the needle, and failed, ultimately, to get him the kind of talent he deserves to play with so he can make a title run. So he asked for a trade. Portland was out of chances. Then he gave Portland one option. Then it got very weird.
Now, perversely, Damian Lillard has become an example of a player feeling too entitled. The thinking goes that because Lillard signed himself a four-year contract extension, he doesn’t get to choose what team he plays for. Lillard disagreed with that thinking and had his agent make quite public that he wants to go to Miami and please don’t mess this up for him. Only, Miami and the rest of the league knowing this completely skewers the trade market Portland would have been relying on to rebuild their team. Now, as of this writing, Lillard, Portland, and Miami are all sitting around a metaphorical room, twiddling their thumbs, waiting out a tense silence before one party speaks up and says “fine, I’m going to give you what you want.” For Lillard, that means Miami. For Miami, that means Lillard. For Portland, that means multiple first round picks and a star player to build around.
As of now, the trade hasn’t happened. There are three options. I believe the most likely option now is some relatively unexpected team swoops in with a compelling offer that Portland takes, leaving Dame and that team to come to terms with each other. The second most likely option is the eventual completion of a trade to Miami for a subpar package, roping in a third team to help translate some assets into something Portland finds more attractive than the ratty shooting of Tyler Herro. The third option is Portland and Lillard slowly reconcile, with Lillard agreeing to give this thing a shot. I actually believe a pairing of Henderson and Lillard could work (just two years ago the Finals featured a 36-year-old Chris Paul paired with a 25-year-old Devin Booker and a 23-year-old DeAndre Ayton — these things can work), but Lillard waited patiently to put out this trade request, and you can bet once he’s put out that word he’s going to want to stick to it. A holdout seems out of character for him, whether that’s in Portland or somewhere else, but we’re in uncharted territory, so anything’s possible.
Meanwhile, the purportedly old Lillard was the NBA’s third-leading scorer, behind Luka Doncic and Joel Embiid, who to be fair are much younger. Lillard hit a career high in points and looked as dynamic as he ever has as a scorer. All of this, while serving to give us confidence in Lillard, should make us equally worried about the Blazers, who couldn’t harness Lillard’s prolific talent into a winning season. After several missteps in building their roster, Portland has proved itself unworthy of stewarding Lillard through the end of his career. A fresh start and a reset timeline are pretty much the only silver linings left for GM Joe Cronin to grab. Cronin, of course took over for Neil Olshey, who squandered multiple iterations of competitive Blazers teams before relinquishing the position. The ownership situation remains fluid as owner Jody Allen, who inherited the team from her husband Paul after his passing, is seemingly unwilling to set up a deal with Nike founder Phil Knight. The ownership is flimsy. The GM is unimpressive. The head coach, Chauncey Billups, has seemed underprepared. The Blazers infrastructure, which seemed quite secure as few as five years ago, is now in complete disarray. While outcomes are determined on the court, off-the-court undermining can greatly impact a team’s ability to reach its potential. Whether the Blazers team has legitimate potential with these players remains to be seen. Whether this current actual organization can win a title with who they have now seems to have long been answered.
12. Anthony Davis, PF, Los Angeles Lakers
Then there’s Anthony Davis. When playing at his peak, when healthy, when motivated, when supported, Davis is a top five player in the league. The problem he’s usually only one to two of those things. When he’s none of those things, he’s irrelevant. The Lakers got him in all forms this year, but got enough games of three to four success factors (let’s call them) to remind the league what Davis is capable of when the ducks are in a row.
All this made it extra disappointing when Davis had several listless performances throughout the Lakers’ sufficiently deep playoff run. Anthony Davis has no business scoring less than 20 points in a playoff game. He did that six times this postseason. Two of his four conference finals games saw him shoot a combined 10–30 from the field (with an admittedly solid 28 rebounds and an impressive 7 blocks in those games, but still).
Davis has won a ring. He will turn 31 next season. He should be in conversations around the best power forward of all time, but he needs to play his way into them. That starts with availability, and it continues with consistency, and it ends with dominance. LeBron James should not be having 30-point halves in elimination games with Davis on his team. Davis needs to shoulder more of that load — that’s right, shoulder more than the greatest player of his generation, who is eight years older than him and declining — for the Lakers to win a championship. The Lakers struck like gold when they sold Russell Westbrook for parts that wound up being far more usable. Part of that required Davis to anchor himself down at center, with Jarred Vanderbilt or Rui Hachimura playing alongside him. Both players will be back, but whether Davis can stay healthy to be that defensive anchor all season long remains a huge question mark. As silly as it seems, Davis’s main responsibility right now is putting the finishing touches on LeBron’s legacy, and sending him out with a ring will take a leap from Davis, not in terms of basketball ability, but in terms of availability and consistent effort. If he gets there, he could send the King out with a last title. That possibility remains out there, but with each passing year, Davis tells us more and more who he is, and that possibility becomes more and more remote.
13. Kawhi Leonard, SF, Los Angeles Clippers
14. Ja Morant, PG, Memphis Grizzlies
It is increasingly wild that there was about a six-month moment where the NBA was a story about Kawhi Leonard. Never has a player won a title “for” a franchise in the way Leonard won a title “for” the Raptors, not even LeBron James winning a title for Cleveland. LeBron James kind of owed Cleveland something for all they invested in him, the Leonard Raptors are and forever shall be the ultimate one night stand in NBA lore.After signing with Los Angeles’s B team, which figured to give him more time in the spotlight after dominating an entire playoff run with Toronto, Leonard has been met by obstacle after obstacle. The man nicknamed for his robot-like affect has been torn down because of the very human-like fallibility of his own body. The 2022–23 season had been Leonard’s triumphant return to form after his 2021 ACL injury, implementing his signature load-management schedule with fidelity, proceeding cautiously with increasing his workload, all until the playoffs finally started. It cost the Clippers some games in the regular season, to be sure, but that wouldn’t matter if Leonard was able to perform at maximum capability in the postseason. After two tremendous games scoring a combined 69 points on 54.5% shooting, he was shut down due to what was eventually diagnosed as a torn meniscus.
Leonard played 52 games, working up to averaging 37.9 minutes per game in the month of March, and averaged 23.8 points per game (27.0 in that prolific month of March). He provided elite level defense that could always be flipped on when the moment called for it, and generally looked like himself. Even still, the Clippers were an outside contender at best during the year and were first round underdogs. The version of Kawhi Leonard that remains in the NBA, the best he can offer the Clippers right now, is going to miss 30 games, and even still is a reliable health concern when the playoffs pick up. Because of this, and not because of his play, he has fallen down from being the Best Player in the World (notably he was probably the first player that wasn’t LeBron James to be considered the world’s best since James’s ascension to that status in about 2007) to where I have him here, 13th, generous by some accounts and stingy by others. Again, it is not his play that has fallen off. It’s him. He can’t stay up. If he can, the Clippers instantly become inner-circle contenders, one figures. But he couldn’t in 2023, he wasn’t able to be back in 2022, he was injured in 2021, and he was beat in 2020 by a fledgling version of this year’s champion Nuggets. While his game hasn’t fallen off, it hasn’t burgeoned the way superstars in their primes tend to polish and expand their game through their peak years. He hasn’t had the opportunity to show any such evolution. Like Anthony Davis, he is a player who supplants someone from within the top 5 of the league’s best when he is healthy and fully engaged, it is just unfortunately so rare that we get to see Leonard in that form.
A player wholly dissimilar to Leonard is Ja Morant. Ja is at peak physicality. Ja’s body may one day break but it has not begun to do so yet, and for that we are all blessed. Unfortunately, Morant’s off-court foibles have begun to seriously impact the player he is able to be for the Memphis Grizzlies. As if last year’s indefinite absence wasn’t enough, a suspension of 25 games was levied against him for a recurrence of guns in his Instagram Live videos. This is frankly, the kind of thing the NBA league office figured it no longer had to deal with. The league has done very much to coach up its players on how to represent the NBA and their communities and themselves off the court. Morant’s pretend play at gangsterdom has finally come at a significant cost to a Grizzlies team that has performed fairly well without him over significant absences in the past two years. He is probably not on his last chance, but hopefully he doesn’t need to exercise that path to any extent. You want players to be able to express themselves and have fun without becoming actually harmful in the views they represent and promote. Morant has crossed that boundary and is paying the price.
Enough moralizing, however. Morant is still one of the singular talents the NBA has ever seen. Only in prime Russell Westbrook and early-era Derrick Rose has the NBA seen a player pulsating so vividly with electricity in their veins. Watching Morant is like watching an active volcano, alternating between powerful eruptions and red-hot simmering. A certain raw sheen to his game figures to fall off over the next few years as he matures and his body loses some of its youthful elasticity, but even so, the player underneath all that is developing into one that is effective and devastating. Morant could lose a foot off his vertical and still dunk at 6'2". He now has two mentors in his own locker room in Rose and Marcus Smart, one who has the experience of a hard upbringing that put him in circles of high trauma, and the other who has the exact balance the Grizzlies are seeking of being tough and gritty on the court while being an exemplary leader off of it. In Rose he also has one of the few humans on the planet who can relate to playing with athletic gifts similar to his, and in Smart he has someone who brings a defensive expertise Morant could borrow from to make him a more well-rounded player. It is ostensibly a perfect situation for Morant to grow as a player and a person, but nothing happens if it isn’t made to happen. Morant, Rose, and Smart must work together and work out the way the Grizzlies hope for Morant to experience the growth that potentially awaits.
15. Anthony Edwards, SG, Minnesota Timberwolves
16. Zion Williamson, PF, New Orleans Pelicans
Which player here do you think winds up with the better career? Edwards was taken first overall a year after Williamson, but has played in 109 more games. Williamson hit his career high 61 games played in 2020–21, but missed all of the following season before playing just 29 games last year. His health issues are crushing a promising career. Williamson is another player, common in this portion of the list, who would easily qualify as top five if he were always operating at peak performance. At least, it’s easy to say that with what Zion has shown. Edwards, meanwhile has been steadily ascending while paying his dues in Minnesota. At this point, it’s easy to see Edwards getting further on health alone, despite Williamson’s advantage in terms of raw ability. The thing is, if Zion gets and stays healthy…
Williamson essentially has to be defended the same way Giannis Antetokounmpo does. You can’t let him catch the ball too high, because he gets a head of steam, and while he’s not the quickest guy in the world, nor does he have Antetokounmpo’s bounding strides, he is a quick thinker who can get himself into position fast and also he weighs as much as Joel Embiid and is six inches shorter. You can’t let him catch the ball too low either, because if he is near the rim, he’s blowing it up. The force required to defend him exceeds what any individual defender is capable of. That requires double teams. Double-teaming him means leaving a very capable New Orleans Pelicans shooter open for three. Zion’s game is not especially complicated at this point in his career, but rather it’s a simple logic puzzle that defenses quickly realize is unsolvable. He’s also a deft finisher off glass and playing to his strong left hand is another wrinkle that defenses have to think about.
Like Morant, who was taken one pick after him, Williamson needs to commit to the work it will take to maximize his potential in the league. Like Morant, Williamson has had an embarrassing offseason, as an ex-girlfriend of his found out he was paying for living space for another woman and aired out very explicit details of their sexual relationship. I did not care to know that Williamson likes spitting in the mouths of his sexual partners, but we don’t get to choose what the news is. Unlike Morant’s gun charades, Williamson’s off-court drama is merely embarrassing and not punishable by suspension, so Williamson should be able to start the season at full go. In addition to his relationship drama, Williamson has the added difficulty of getting in what is considered for him to be appropriate basketball shape. He gets critiqued on this in one breath after being praised for the singular strength and heft he’s able to play with in the breath prior. He lives in one of the most delicious cities in the world and added weight has the effect of making him better at basketball. When you’re 23 years old, it has to feel like a win-win. Unfortunately, he’s already lost 214 regular season opportunities and more potential postseason games due to health issues. He’s also losing value in the league and if he plays less than 60 games this year, he’ll lose millions off his next contract. It sucks, because this guy whose body is a gift from God shouldn’t have to be told who he oughtn’t have sex with or what he oughtn’t eat. They frequently say that winning solves everything, and if that’s true then so too is its opposite: losing makes everything a problem. Williamson has lost more time than he has games, and hopefully that ends. I ranked him 30th last year after he missed the entire season prior. He’s still hard to rank, but he showed enough this season to show that his ceiling is still what we thought it was, if not higher. We just need to see it on the court.
To contrast, Edwards played a career-high 79 games this season, and boy did his Timberwolves need it. Edwards grabbed the mantle from injured co-star Karl-Anthony Towns to lead the Wolves to a play-in berth, which they were able to convert into an eight seed, where they fought the eventual champion Nuggets hard but managed just one win. After missing Towns practically all year, the Wolves saw Gobert suspended from a crucial play-in game for punching teammate Kyle Anderson, while forward Jaden McDaniels ended his season early by punching a wall and breaking a hand. All this after losing high-caliber reserve center Naz Reid to injury late in the year. Amidst all this chaos and bad luck and stupidity, Edwards showed up and showed out. He had career highs in rebounds, assists, points, steals, blocks, field-goal percentage and 3-point percentage. Granted he’s besting just two other seasons with those numbers, that’s still remarkably holistic improvement. After being distinctively the team’s second option behind Towns in 21–22, Towns’ injury opened the door for Edwards to take over the role as franchise alpha, and he is not giving it back. He is 22.
Edwards’ potential rests on the functionality of his supporting cast. The costly addition of Rudy Gobert proved to be a clunky fit at best alongside Towns. The Wolves moved a major franchise piece, D’Angelo Russell, who is a longtime friend of Towns’, and brought in older, slower, more methodical Mike Conley to run the offense. It feels like a team built around Gobert, its defensive anchor, rather than Edwards, its star. Towns’ name has surfaced as a potential trade candidate to further accommodate the Gobert iteration of the Timberwolves, as the two struggled to find cohesion in limited regular season action alongside each other. If the Wolves struggle in the first half of the season, Towns could be moved. The hope for Edwards and Wolves fans is that Gobert and Towns can fit together, Edwards can continue to improve and make life easier for his teammates, and Minnesota can evolve into the team it imagined itself becoming when it sent away three first round picks and young talent to add the French shot-blocker. If the pieces around him can cooperate, Edwards may continue to ascend and become one of the league’s signature players at the shooting guard position. His summer with Team USA at the FIBA World Cup was a tantalizing preview of the type of alpha dog Edwards can become.
17. Donovan Mitchell, G, Cleveland Cavaliers
18. Paul George, F, Los Angeles Clippers
How important is Paul George anymore? When he was a third-year player holding his own in a conference finals against peak LeBron James, the sky seemed to be the limit for him. He has so much size for someone so smooth, and defensively he was a looming menace that could keep in front of almost anyone. There are certain players you watch and think, this guy is going to win a title eventually; it’s inevitable. Paul George, however, is not one of those guys. He’s very talented, he has everything you want in a lead dog: size, defensive ability, ability to score at every level on offense — but he has never felt inevitable. His freak leg fracture while playing for Team USA in 2014 is still one of the major what-ifs in the last 10 years. From there, he grew disgruntled in Indiana and tried to force a trade to the Lakers. He settled for Oklahoma City, paired with Russell Westbrook, appeared to commit long-term to that core, and then wanted out a couple years later after what was the closest he came to an MVP campaign in 2018–19. He got his city and teammate of choice (albeit not his franchise), and since then the Clippers have lived in limbo of waiting for both George and Kawhi Leonard to be healthy at the same time. It’s happened once, and in their first season together, they blew a 3–1 conference semifinal lead to the Denver Nuggets. Throughout his whole career, George has never really come closer than in that third season, one win away from the NBA Finals. That’s just not how careers of players like George go in the NBA. Eventually they find something, or they fade away and we don’t really remember them being there at all.
This could be a fall-off season for George. It’s coming eventually, somewhere over the next four years. Eventually you’re going to look up and Paul George isn’t going to be capable of carrying a team. In fact, he oddly asserted in March of this year that he didn’t think he could be the best player on a title-winning team. As in, he didn’t think he could as far back as when he was in Indiana, and that was part of why he wanted to move on from there. Now, at age 33, I believe George can’t be the best player on a championship team. But in 2016? I would have believed that. Did I believe in Paul George more than Paul George did? That makes me really worried about Paul George. It makes me worried about the Los Angeles Clippers, a loser franchise if there ever was one. Not like in the sense of having poor character (the way that former owner Donald Sterling was a loser), but just always coming up short. Second place in the city for decades. Hadn’t made a conference finals until George and Leonard got them there and Leonard’s knee gave out. How are they going to change their chemistry so things don’t seem so bound to fail? The Clippers feel like that. Paul George feels like that. He cracked 40 points a few times this season. He’s still capable of dominating. But I’m increasingly convinced he doesn’t really have a north star. What is he competing for? He just seems to like being one of the five best basketball players in Los Angeles. He has an air of complacency that he clearly should not have. Kawhi Leonard already proved he was the best player in the world when he won a title for the Raptors. Westbrook proved he was one of the best players in the world when he won an MVP. Both those players have secure legacies (yes, even Westbrook). George acts like he has a secure legacy, like he’s Kevin Durant too, and he just hasn’t earned it. He’s been as good as you can be without being good enough, by NBA superstar standards. Soon, he will be out of time to secure a legacy. He will be Vince Carter without the dunks.
Speaking of players who were drafted to a small market, thrived, eventually asked to be sent to one of the league’s major markets, and were sent instead to another small market, where they thrived further, here’s Donovan Mitchell. Mitchell’s fit in Cleveland was absolutely perfect for the regular season. He and Garland made sure that the Cavaliers’ offense had a constant engine, despite their pace being last in the league, their offensive efficiency (points per 100 possessions) ranked 8th in the league after being tied for 17th the year prior. Defensively, the backcourt of Garland and Mitchell was cancelled out by the pairing of Jarrett Allen and Evan Mobley.
Mitchell himself shined. He averaged a career-high 28.3 points per game, (virtually) tying his career high in 3-point percentage at 38.6% and shooting 48.4% overall, 3.5 percentage points higher than his previous best, which is significant. He burst through the plateau he seemed to have reached in Utah. In order to elevate himself further up these rankings, he needs to have more playoff showcases like he had in 2020 in the bubble, where he and Jamal Murray were competing firework displays for an entire seven-game series, and he’ll need to win them. The Cavaliers’ five-game exit to New York was disappointing, and Mitchell averaged just 23.2 points per game, shooting 28.9% from three and 43.3% overall. Those numbers make it look like he took advantage of the lower intensity of regular season games, which isn’t what happened, but still — it’s a bad look.
Nonetheless, Mitchell improves four spots here from last year’s rankings (from 21) while George drops one (from 17). Mitchell played 68 games and led the Cavs to their highest finish without LeBron James since they finished fourth in the East in 1996 (the Knicks beat them in the first round then, too). It was a feel-good enough regular season that the year overall feels good for Cleveland in spite of the terrible postseason run. The Cavaliers won’t get that same benefit of the doubt next year. For Mitchell, this means added pressure to show he’s one of the league’s true superstars, not just a regular season scorer.
19. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, SG, Oklahoma City Thunder
20. Trae Young, PG, Atlanta Hawks
The NBA’s most improved player could probably be argued to be higher on this list. His average of 31.4 points per game this season is just the 35th season in NBA history to average so many points per game. The Big Three in Oklahoma City to whom he is a successor did it a combined four times (Harden twice, Durant once, Westbrook once); Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain did it a combined 13 times (Chamberlain 7 times; Jordan 6). It’s a rare thing, and even though scoring was up leaguewide because pace was heightened, it’s still damn impressive. If it hadn’t come in a year where the Thunder had snuck into the play-in as the 10th seed (with Dallas tanking to allow them there), it would have been more impressive. Enter next season. The Thunder should have everything they need to become a legitimate team in the West next season. Josh Giddey is entering year three, Gilgeous-Alexander enters year six, Luguentz Dort enters year five, Jalen Williams enters year two, and Chet Holmgren will finally get a chance to show what kind of player he is. They will be young for the next decade because their talent stockade is oversaturated with future draft picks, but they have a core with enough experience, and enough talent, to compete. Gilgeous-Alexander may be the best scoring two guard in the league as his point-per-game average suggests, but context makes a significant case for asking to see more.
The evolution in SGA’s game has been fascinating. He increased his scoring by almost 7 points per game this past season, and did so by cutting his number of 3-point attempts in half, from 5.3 to 2.5 per game. Somehow Gilgeous-Alexander went from 41.8% on 4.9 threes per game through 35 games of 2021 to 30.0% on 5.3 threes per game in 56 games in 2021–22. That dramatic dropoff nudged Gilgeous-Alexander beneath the arc where he found gold. Observe how SGA’s shot chart has evolved over the years by examining a triptych of shot charts from Year 1, Year 3, and Year 5 of SGA:
Will his game keep evolving, or did he find the sweet spots he can make a career on? Is he going to keep changing things up arbitrarily to keep it fresh? Who is Shai Gilgeous-Alexander? He’s a crafty, versatile scorer, and as the Thunder ripen into a true contender, he will garner a larger spotlight from opponents, media, and fans alike. How he follows up this season will be fascinating to see.
Trae Young falls seven spots due as much to lost luster as to a decline in productivity. While he rapidly ascended to one of the league’s brightest young stars (momentarily giving Atlanta the lead on the Doncic-Young trade, a lead which has long since been given back to Dallas), the Hawks have stalled out and have begun looking like a team that caught a couple breaks in their lone deep playoff run with Young at the helm. After bringing in Dejounte Murray to add some variety to a very Trae Young-centric offense, the Hawks finally cut bait on the Nate McMillan era (and the conference final run was sumptuous bait indeed), and brought in Quin Snyder to try and make things work. Young has a lot to prove regarding whether he can be effective doing anything other than dominating the ball. Only Ja Morant ran more pick and rolls per game as a ballhandler, but Young was in the 66th percentile for points per possession on such plays — good but not amazing. Being good but not amazing gets your team a play-in berth and a first round exit. The NBA has to want more for Trae Young than that.
So how does he get there? The Hawks have to use Young and Murray more dynamically to maximize their effectiveness. Young has to find his path in life off the ball, so that the Hawks can keep defenses off-balance. Young’s 3-point shooting dropped off nearly 5 percentage points in 2022–23. The Hawks need to create better shots for Young to get that percentage back up. His overall shooting percentage of 42.9% ranked 363rd in the league, when you filter for minimum shot requirements, you find the people Young is in company with are young chuckers like LaMelo Ball, Jalen Green, Jaden Ivey, Jordan Poole, and Bones Hyland. Young is too good and too seasoned to be in their company anymore. Young must mitigate turnovers, as he had the most in the league last season, turning the ball over 300 times (second place was Anthony Edwards, with 259), for a league-leading 4.1 turnovers per game. These traits (Traets?) get at the inefficiency that keeps a low ceiling on Young-led Hawks teams and gets at why he’s losing his luster. The logo threes in the playoffs are cool, but can he make Atlanta win? Not at these rates. Enter Snyder. He must unlock a side of Young’s game that has been missing: his off-ball game. He’s probably had 90% of his team’s dribbles in every basketball game since his first year at the Boys and Girls Club, but that needs to change because as good as he is, he needs his team to be better.
21. Bam Adebayo, C, Miami Heat
22. Karl-Anthony Towns, PF, Minnesota Timberwolves
Bam Adebayo has more unseen talent than any player in the league. He has increased his scoring output in each of his six years in the league, dutifully pushing past 20 points per game (20.4) last year for the first time. The Heat needed every bit of it, as they dealt with a rash of injuries and held on through a grindy regular season to make the play-in. Bam’s evolution as a scorer is the main needle-mover for how much respect and acclaim he gets, but his defensive output, his skills as a hub on offense, his ability as a screener, all that non-sexy, non-debatable stuff is what moves the needle for Miami on a nightly basis. He managed to be comfortably the best player in an NBA Finals for his team, and it was those other things, not his average of 21.8 points in that series, that made him so.
Heat fans have largely come to appreciate Adebayo (it’s taken time!) and treat him like some misunderstood artist. Stephen Curry is at one end of the spectrum of being easy to appreciate. Adebayo’s probably near the polar opposite end of said spectrum. He makes easy shots, and plays hard and does the right things. The thing is, playing hard all the time is insanely difficult. And there are a million right things to do all the time and it is insanely difficult to be doing them consistently. His defense gets some attention, but only in big moments. Adebayo anchors the Heat, makes them miserable to play against, and keeps working. It’ll be exciting if he is able to find his comfortable spots as a scorer and bump up to around 23 to 24 points a game, but if he stays at 20 for his career he can still be a top 15 player just because of everything else he brings, all the things #HEATculture relies on.
A bad year just kept getting worse for Karl-Anthony Towns. First, the addition of Rudy Gobert replaced several of his teammates (and future teammates) with a player that fits awkwardly next to him. Towns’ minutes at center all but evaporated, particularly to start games and in crunch time. Then, 21 games into the season Towns was sidelined for four months. He got in eight games of work before the playoffs started, and during that time he was out, D’Angelo Russell, a good friend of his and someone he helped recruit to Minnesota, got shipped out. The Timberwolves found some semblance of chemistry together in their few postseason games, but still ended the year with the seed planted that given what was invested in Gobert, moving Towns may be the only way to make the team fit better together, even though Towns is probably a much better player than Gobert.
No trade has materialized, and the zest of a new year should provide Towns with some leeway to prove he can play alongside the Stifle Tower, but the burden of proof is nonetheless still on him, where before Towns had nothing to prove to his franchise, but could focus on proving to the league alongside his franchise that he was a bona fide star. He was well on his way, too: 2021–22 was perhaps his best, most well-rounded season, and I thought he made sense as a dark horse MVP candidate, not realizing how much Gobert’s mere presence would bite into his offensive game. He averaged 20.8 points in 29 games, his lowest scoring average since his rookie season, and that average dropped to 18.2 points in the five games against Denver in round one of the playoffs. I definitely believe Towns can bounce back and be a top 15 player in the league again, but there are definitely two paths, and that’s just one of them. The other is he can’t fit in Minnesota, and either diminishes or gets moved and has to figure things out somewhere else, probably not as a team’s number one option the way he has comfortably been for Minnesota in recent years.
The list so far (and their Instragram followers):
1. Nikola Jokic (N/A)
2. Giannis Antetokounmpo (15.7 million)
3. Stephen Curry (54.3 million)
4. Joel Embiid (7.4 million)
5. Luka Doncic (8.4 million)
6. Jayson Tatum (6.5 million)
7. Kevin Durant (13.3 million)
8. Jimmy Butler (9.6 million)
9. Devin Booker (5.5 million)
10. LeBron James (158 million)
11. Damian Lillard (9.9 million)
12. Anthony Davis (N/A)
13. Kawhi Leonard (N/A)
14. Ja Morant (9.8 million)
15. Anthony Edwards (1.5 million)
16. Zion Williamson (5.3 million)
17. Donovan Mitchell (3.8 million)
18. Paul George (10.1 million)
19. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (2.3 million)
20. Trae Young (5.1 million)
21. Bam Adebayo (978,000)
22. Karl-Anthony Towns (4.2 million)