The 25 Best Players In The NBA Right Now

Imagine the NBA is starting from scratch — a full reboot. Who would the top 25 draft picks be?

Imagine a world where all NBA contracts are three years long and the league resets itself from scratch after every three-year window.

Now imagine this summer is a reboot year.

Perhaps the league did this to counteract the superteams, maybe to throw a little chaos into the mix. Whatever the reason, I gathered a panel of NBA experts in serge, Luke Goodman, Jonny Moy, and Rob Myers to join me in projecting how a reset draft might go.

Who would you take if you were building an NBA team from scratch for the next three years and had the #1 pick? You get the player as is — at their current age, skill, and health level (ignore their contracts). Is LeBron the top pick? Where do recent MVPs Westbrook and Curry land? What about guys like Kyrie Irving or DeMarcus Cousins?

We had our panel rank their top 25 picks and compiled them into one list of their composite rankings. Here are the results, broken into tiers — and this was our full redraft through three rounds.

Simply The Best

1. LeBron James 2. Kevin Durant

Not much needs to be said other than noting that the top tier is a clear two instead of an obvious one for the first time in years. Every voter had these two names at the top, with three first-place votes for LeBron and two for Durant.

We’ve been waiting forever for LeBron’s inevitable decline to get underway, but it still hasn’t happened. History says it has to sometime in the next couple years and that it may be a hard and quick fall, but for now The King sits on his throne. Still, he’s no longer undisputed. Is this his last year as the overall #1?

No Shame Being Third And Fourth Best

3. Steph Curry 4. Kawhi Leonard

The Warriors might be Curry’s team, but our panel agreed unanimously that Durant is the more valuable player because of what he adds with his size and defense. Just how much of Curry’s success for the Warriors is due to Curry himself and how much of it is due to playing with Klay and Draymond in that system? That’s impossible to determine — and isn’t Steph himself the focal point of the system? No one in the league bends defenses like Curry. Would he be worse on another team, or would he put up 35 points, 10 assists, and 6 rebounds per night on a team comparable to last year’s Thunder squad?

Leonard is the best wing defender in the league by far. Everyone talked about how much Westbrook and Harden did this season with so little help, but Leonard did not have appreciably more help than they did, and he still managed to lead the Spurs to 61 wins and the Western Conference Finals. There’s no one quite as efficient offensively and maybe no one as impactful on defense. But will Kawhi ever ascend to one of the top two spots on the list, or is his ceiling third best or below? This could be his season to take the next step. Westbrook and Harden now have elite teammates, so Leonard enters the season as the MVP favorite.

The Clear Next Four

5. Giannis Antetokounmpo 6. James Harden 7. Anthony Davis 8. Russell Westbrook

Everyone on the panel ranked these four players between 4 and 9 overall, with one exception coming from…*ahem…a Russ hater who placed him at #18. These are the guys that put up booming annual numbers but don’t play deep into June like the four above them — at least not yet. Are they winners?

Giannis looks most ready to leap into the top 4. In the watered down East, he could break through to the Conference Finals in the next year or two. Could Giannis be #1 on this list in three years? LeBron, KD, and Steph will all be in their 30s, while Giannis will be 25 and just hitting his peak. If he adds a jumper or lock-down defense, we think he’ll get there. If he adds both, it’s all over.

Harden is the only one of these four to get a top 4 vote We know what he is now: a savant on offense and a sieve on defense. He lost the MVP to Westbrook but beat him cleanly here, ahead on all but one ballot. Viewers saw Harden elevate his teammates’ play this year while Westbrook seemed to elevate his own numbers.

Anthony Davis definitely shouldn’t be 7th on the list. A stud big man that can do everything at age 24 should either be a top 5 player if he’s for real or out of the top 10 if he’s not. Seventh feels like an admission that we’re not totally sure. Davis is a machine offensively and pretty good on defense, but his Pelicans have averaged a 36–46 record the last three seasons. Kawhi, Harden, and Russ all dragged mediocre rosters to the playoffs — why can’t Brow?

Westbrook seemed a begrudging vote by most on the panel — a “well I guess he just won MVP so he has to rank somewhere up here, but I sure don’t want to be the one building a team around him” vote. How do you build a great Westbrook team, emphases on “great” and “team”? Wouldn’t you add a rim-wrecking center and an elite level wing plus shooters and defenders around them? Haven’t we already seen Westbrook’s best possible team, those Thunder teams that always seemed to come up short?

So…The Timberwolves Might Be Good

9. Jimmy Butler 10. Paul George 11. Karl-Anthony Towns

There was a clear drop-off after the top 8, but the Timberwolves have two of the next three according to our panel. Someone once described Jimmy Butler as LeBron James, but if he were human. He does everything at a really-good-but-not-elite level, and he just got traded for a player coming off a torn ACL, a top 5 draft bust, and a pick swap. Now he gets to pair with Towns, a player that might be a hair over-ranked but one who averaged 28 points and 13 rebounds a game post-All-Star break. The Timberwolves are the only team other than the Warriors and Thunder to have two top 12 players. Paul George was just traded for a former Indiana star on a bad contract, Victor Oladipo, and a 2016 lottery pick, Domantas Sabonis. He’s the first guy on this list who looks like an elite second banana but not a top dog.

This Really Was An Historic Summer, Huh?

12. John Wall 13. Chris Paul 14. Gordon Hayward

It’s a pretty wild NBA offseason when 4 of the top 14 players change teams in one summer, especially when three of those four team up with other top 14 guys. This was where voters really started to disagree. Three had CP3 ahead of Wall, but no one was ready to sell the farm for either point guard. Paul at 13 seems like a compromise. He’s closer to a top 5 player when healthy, but he’s only healthy for a half a season nowadays and moving in the wrong direction at age 32. Wall looks poised to take his place among the elite point guards, but CP3 is undeniably the better defender and more efficient and useful player for now. Hayward finished 13th to 16th on every ballot, a low-variance guy at a valuable position that’s probably not quite good enough to really be the star player on an elite title contender.

The Controversies

15. Kyrie Irving 16. Draymond Green 17. Nikola Jokic

Kyrie, Draymond, and Jokic were the highest variance choices on the list. Each players received one top 10 vote, and each was 20th or lower on one ballot. So which of three would you want to build a team around if they were your star?

I was the voter who put Green in the top 10. It’s undeniable that Draymond is far more valuable on this Warriors team than in any other situation — what would Draymond even be without Curry and Klay taking all the shots? It’s hard to imagine. But he’s the most valuable team defender in the league and has slashed a 12/9/7 line over the past two years. There’s simply no one like him. I still contend he is the most important player in the league right now; the one guy the Warriors aren’t the Warriors without.

Jokic has insane advanced numbers, particularly offensively. He averaged 18 points, 12 boards, and 6 assists after the break, and he has a devastating 20-foot shot that stretches defenses almost as much as all those three-point bombers. Imagine what he can be if he takes that shot another two steps out and his team adds a couple defenders like Paul Millsap by his side.

Irving seems to provoke the widest array of opinions right now. He came in 8, 13, 14, 19, and unranked on one of the ballots. It’s lazy and unfair to say Irving never won any games without LeBron — that’s true but it’s also true of almost every other young point guard, and Kyrie isn’t the same player anymore. Irving averaged 25 points and 6 assists as the secondary handler on the Cavs this year, and he’s still just 25, an age when point guards such as Curry, Lowry, Lillard, Conley, and others really took their leap forward. Just how good can Kyrie still be now that he will be on his own, or, at least more on his own than he’s used to once the Cavs finalize his conscious decoupling from LeBron? We may find out soon enough.

Can You Build a Winner If They’re Your Best Guy?

18. Rudy Gobert 19. DeMarcus Cousins 20. Klay Thompson

Gobert is the lowest ranked player that was on every top 25 ballot. He’s absolutely devastating on defense; the one player in the league good enough to guarantee a top 5 defense on his own with the way he affects almost every possession in the pivot. Gobert finished among the league leaders in offensive and defensive rating this season.

Klay Thompson is a difficult rank. He’s the best shooting guard in the league (unless you count Harden) with a pitch perfect shot that shifts the entire defense. But just how valuable is that in the modern NBA? It’s hard to say because the league’s top shooting guards (Klay, Bradley Beal, C.J. McCollum) all play next to an elite point guard, so we don’t know how valuable they can be without that star handler next to them. Thompson’s defense may be a little overrated at this point, but he’s a player every team in the NBA would want and that makes him scarce — and valuable. That’s four Warriors in the top 20, in case you’re still wondering why they’re so good.

Boogie is the ultimate enigma. How do you average 27 points, 11 boards, and 4 assists a game and not even make the top 20 on over half the ballots? Cousins has never sniffed the playoffs in nine years in the NBA and he’s whatever you’d call the opposite of an advanced metrics darling. The numbers say Boogie is a better defender than you think but a far less valuable player on offense. Isn’t Cousins something akin to what Westbrook became this year, a high-usage guy who racks up numbers that don’t pass the eye test, but without ever actually dragging his team to a winning record? Is he still a top 25 franchise player? Was he ever?

Yikes I Hope This Guy Isn’t My Franchise Player

21. Blake Griffin 22. Damian Lillard 23. Kevin Love 24. Marc Gasol 25. Paul Millsap

NBA fans love to talk about max level contracts. Is Gasol overpaid? Was Blake worth a max contract? Should Millsap have gotten a max deal this summer?

The answer in every case is both yes and no. Yes, these players are all “max level” players. Thirty NBA teams have a slot for a max level player, and these are top 30 NBA players. Really, thirty teams have a slot for a couple max guys in theory, so that might make 50 or 60 guys worthy of a max contract, and therein lies the flaw.

Should Marc Gasol and Paul Millsap really be able to earn the same category of contract as LeBron and Kawhi? How many players from this group would the Spurs trade Kawhi Leonard for? Two? Three? They’re probably better off with three or four of them, but not at the price they’d cost.

The NBA is a superstar league. It always has been and it always will be. And if one of these deserving max players is the best guy on your roster, your upside will always be a hard fought first- or second-round exit.

Also Receiving Votes

Bradley Beal (20 and 23) Kristaps Porzingis (21 and 24) Myles Turner (20) DeAndre Jordan (24 and 25) Kyle Lowry (22) Isaiah Thomas (23) Mike Conley (25) C.J. McCollum (25)

The Draft Results

So what would the NBA look like if you threw all the players back into a pool and had a draft? Our panel decided to find out with a full NBA redraft, featuring 24 new teams in a snake draft. Each player is signed for just the next three years, and you get them at their current age, health, and talent level.

Here’s the order in which they were chosen, with their composite ranking in parentheses on the right:

1. LeBron James (1) 2. Giannis Antetokounmpo (5) 3. Kevin Durant (2) 4. Steph Curry (3) 5. Kawhi Leonard (4) 6. James Harden (6) 7. Anthony Davis (7) 8. Russell Westbrook (8) 9. Karl-Anthony Towns (11) 10. John Wall (12) 11. Jimmy Butler (9) 12. Paul George (10) 13. Kyrie Irving (15) 14. Joel Embiid (NR) 15. Klay Thompson (20) 16. Draymond Green (16) 17. Chris Paul (13) 18. Nikola Jokic (17) 19. DeMarcus Cousins (19) 20. Mike Conley (NR) 21. Damian Lillard (22) 22. Gordon Hayward (14) 23. Rudy Gobert (18) 24. Paul Millsap (25)

The draft is still in progress, so stay tuned for more results ahead and a recap of the teams after three rounds on Monday.

So who did the panel select too high, and who were the steals of the draft? Who else would you have ranked among your top 25? Start the debate in the comments below.

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