John Wall Isn’t Happy About His SI Top 100 Rank, But Pierre Jackson Can’t Complain About His #NBARank

Mandatory Credit: Geoff Burke-USA TODAY Sports

It’s ranking season, everyone, so get ready for some angry fans and NBA players.

The few websites that partake in the fun do it in their own different ways. As you may know, ESPN’s #NBARank is rather exhaustive, as they rank every single player in the League. For that reason, theirs takes a long time to come to an end — since starting on September 15th, they’re only at number 376 right now, so there’s still many more names to be revealed.

Sports Illustrated, on the other hand, keep theirs short and sweet, limiting it to the top 100 players, so they’ve already covered some good ground on theirs. Since starting theirs on the same day as ESPN’s, they got down to number 31 yesterday, which, shockingly, turned out to be the Washington Wizards’ John Wall.

Wall had a career-year in 2013-2014, averaging 19.3 points, 8.8 assists, 4.1 rebounds and 1.8 steals. He was named an All-Star for the first time since being drafted number one in the 2010 draft, and he led the Washington Wizards to their first playoff birth since 2007-2008.

However, Wall’s summer hasn’t gone exactly as he had planned. He was dealt his first set of bad news when he was cut from Team USA — to make matters worse, he received a late invitation, too — and if that wasn’t motivating enough, Sports Illustrated’s rank seems to have been the icing on the cake.

Sports Illustrated responded to Wall’s tweet, apologising for putting him so low, thereby making sense of Wall’s, at the time, rather cryptic message. And of course, thanks to the wonders of Twitter, Wall fired back.

Interestingly enough, there was another NBA player who responded to his ranking (this time ESPN’s) but he had a rather different reaction to where he was put on the list.

Pierre Jackson spent all of last season in the D-League playing for the Idaho Stampede, and the 5-foot-10 guard averaged a league-high 29.1 points per game on 44.9 percent shooting from the field and 34.9 percent from three. As a result, he was ranked as the D-League’s top prospect for nearly the entire season and seemed destined to get a shot in the NBA.

However, despite putting up those gaudy numbers, the New Orleans Pelicans, who held his draft rights, refused to call him up, meaning Jackson didn’t appear in an NBA game at all in his rookie season. He got some good news this summer, though, when the Pelicans traded him to the Philadelphia 76ers. For a team that is in the middle of a long, drawn-out rebuild, Jackson was set to get a heavy dose of minutes next season. But, sadly, he suffered an Achilles injury during Summer League, putting his NBA dreams on hold for at least another season.

Nevertheless, despite not playing a single minute in the NBA, Jackson has showcased enough to be ranked as the 425th best player in ESPN’s books. And he’s appreciative of that.

So there you have it. John Wall isn’t happy about his Sports Illustrated rank, while Pierre Jackson can’t complain about his #NBArank.

Some fun dichotomy, there.