The Whiteboard: Context is everything when it comes to NBA rankings

Ranking NBA players is fun, but without the proper context it’s hard to really determine their order.

Ben Golliver and Rob Mahoney’s annual top 100 NBA players of the coming season list dropped this week, and predictably a lot of fans and others who follow the league are up in arms about where some players rated out.

Their list is always one of the better ones, as it’s very clear that Golliver and Mahoney really put a lot of careful thought into where everybody ends up. That’s hard to do when making a list of 100!

Still, and this is no offense to those two or to anybody else who does player rankings, those kinds of lists are always going to be limited in how useful they can be. Any list of simply the “best” player is devoid of context. It takes place in a weird vacuum universe where it’s impossible to weigh the surrounding pieces.

There are some cases where one player is always going to be more useful than another, context be damned. There’s no universe where somebody would pass up LeBron James to instead get, say, Kyle Anderson. (Sorry Slo-Mo.) But two vastly different players could both be clearly better than the other, depending on situation. Let’s take Blake Griffin and Draymond Green for example.

On the Golden State Warriors, Draymond is the better player. Blake is a good scorer, but he’s not good enough to justify taking so many touches from Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant, or even Klay Thompson, especially at the expense of all the stuff Draymond does defensively. Blake doesn’t make sense there.

On a team that desperately needs someone who can put up 20 points and 10 rebounds basically every night, Blake is probably ‘better’, or at least more useful, than Draymond might be.

This problem can be mitigated somewhat by simply looking at which players have the most widespread appeal, ie who would be the best in the most situations, but still, there’s more at play than simply saying player x is definitively better than player y.

The very best teams have carefully crafted ecosystems where weaknesses are hidden and strengths are maximized. It’s still possible to see that some players are better than others, but having one bulletproof list isn’t feasible.

And that’s fine! That just means there’s room for debate, both on rankings themselves and the methods behind them. It’s just important to keep in mind that, up to this point, basketball has yet to be played in a vacuum.

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