Revisiting The Step Back’s 2018 NBA 25-under-25 list

Before the season started, we tried to sort out the best 25 players under the age of 25. Here are all the ways we got it wrong (and one way we got it right)

For a sport where the ultimate outcome often seems predetermined, the NBA is good for a filthy slider every now and again.

It’s why lists and articles like the 25-under-25 we put out back in October are so much fun. It lets us all go back six months later and look at how stupid we all were.

It’s not like we didn’t know this was coming. In 2017, when we put out the first edition of this list, there were some daytime-sports-talk-radio-caller level gems. Andrew Wiggins nearly cracked the top 10. Ben Simmons was eight spots lower than Otto Porter. Nerlens Noel and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope both snuck into the top 25.

We also got some things right in that first go-round two years ago. Four of our original top six – Giannis Antetokounmpo, Joel Embiid, Karl-Anthony Towns and Nikola Jokic — were atop this year’s list, and the two that didn’t make it either aged out (Anthony Davis) or got injured (Kristaps Porzingis). We were also ahead of the curve with a few of our original Best of the Rest picks, nailing Jayson Tatum and Clint Capela as players on the rise.

So complete idiots, we are not. That said, in reviewing this years edition six months after the fact, we have far more misses than hits. If this were baseball, our place in the lineup would be secure. Sadly, we’re more like Russell Westbrook from behind the arc.

Of all the omissions, none is more egregious than someone who not only didn’t make our top 25 but didn’t even get on this year’s Best of the Rest. I’ll even go so far as to reveal — at the risk of certain death — that based on the voting of our staff, if we’d have done a top 50, he would have barely made that list as well…