The best NBA player, right now, of every age

The best 25-year-old: Joel Embiid

To watch Joel Embiid play is to chase the dragon. His brilliance takes us higher, brings visions of realities we never imagined, but it never lasts. Since being drafted, Embiid has missed 82, 82, 51, 19, 18 and 21 games. And yet with Anthony Davis now playing mostly power forward, Embiid — when healthy — is the best center in the NBA. He’s already an annual fixture on All-Defense teams. He dominates from the low post or facing the basket. Give him an inch and he’ll drill a jumper; for all the kvetching about his taste for the longball, centers who take four 3s a game and convert a league-average percentage from deep are still closer to unicorns than pigeons. One argument against Embiid’s perimeter proclivities is they spare the defense the near-impossible task of stopping him inside the arc: he ranked among the league leaders in free throw attempts per game and converted 71 percent of his looks from 0-3 feet.

The best 26-year-old: Anthony Davis

Davis is another generational talent who’s missed a lot of games over the years. But there’s a reason the Lakers couldn’t wait to trade three young players and four first-round picks for him, and it wasn’t just making LeBron James happy. Davis is an all-world talent who devastates opponents on both ends of the floor, in transition, in their game planning, in their heads, etc. If you were designing the perfect player in a lab and could pull a Frankenstein and defy the rules of nature, you’d make Davis. In 10th grade, he was a 6-foot-2 guard. By his senior year, he was 6-foot-10, combining the skills of a guard with the body of a big. Even with LeBron putting up his usual humdrum historic numbers, Davis is why L.A. leaped from the lottery to a Finals favorite.