Every year, major media outlets (including us!) release a list of the best players in the NBA. And every year, that list is remembered for maybe a dozen or so slights. Social media typically rallies a handful of fanbases to outrage against how unfairly the outlet in question is treating their favorite player, and among those aggrieved cities, a few turn out to be completely correct when the season actually arrives, thereby invalidating the entire exercise in their eyes.In defense of those outlets (again… ours included!), the voting body is not a monolith.
Just because one list is lower on your favorite player than you think it should be doesn't mean every individual voter was.And so, with our list of the top 100 players in the NBA now released, we've decided to give our voters the chance to join those social media hordes and explain where we believe our colleagues erred. Each of our voters selected one player, based on their own top 100 rankings and the final list we published as a group, to name as the league's most underrated player. Maybe we were too low on your favorite player as a whole, but maybe you'll cut us a bit of slack when you find out that he had at least one staunch defender in our ranks.
Top 100 ranking: No. 30Why he should be higher: The Hawks' young star wing upped his production, improved his shooting efficiency and was the No. 1 option on a playoff team to earn his first All-Star and All-NBA selection in 2025. I think that's deserving of a bit more than the No. 30 spot in our rankings. Yes, Johnson showed some growing pains in the playoffs, but was also dealing with a hellacious Knicks wing defense that went on to win a title.
It's not hard to see this guy continuing to climb the NBA ladder into superstardom this season, and at 25 he's got plenty of runway to continue improving. He will continue to get more comfortable with being in a leading role, and his playmaking ability at 6-foot-8 is what every front office dreams of. -- Robby Kalland Top 100 ranking: No. 41Why he should be higher: If you're a skeptic because of his defense, his durability, even his maturity, fine, I can acknowledge those are real issues. I don't think people grasp just what an incredible shot-creator LaMelo Ball was last year.
From Dec. 6 on, the Hornets had the NBA's best offense last season. In that span, the Charlotte offense declined by 13.2 points per 100 possessions during the minutes played without Ball... just below the amount the Nuggets declined without Nikola Jokić (13.4) in that same window. Charlotte's starters had the highest offensive rating of any five-man lineup to play 200 minutes last year at a bonkers 134.9 points per 100 possessions.
Well... let's look at how those starters fared without LaMelo last season. Brandon Miller's true shooting was four percentage points higher with Ball on the court than without him. The other three starters (Kon Knueppel, Miles Bridges and Moussa Diabaté) all saw their true shooting decline by at least eight percentage points without him.
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