NBA: Ranking every team’s best player in 2018-19

The NBA has players changing teams at a historic rate. As the 2018-19 season approaches, let’s rank every team’s best player.

Being a fan of NBA basketball is being a fan of competition, in one sense or another. Players taking on players, teams taking on teams, basketball taking on football, baseball and soccer. At every level, past the fun and antics and narratives and personalities, is competition.

Every season a single team is crowned champion, after 82 regular season games and at least 16 postseason games. Those contests leave us with win-loss records, making it clear which teams were better than others. There is no such easy table for ranking players.

That does not mean it should not or cannot be done. There is value to ranking players within a team; it shines a light on internal dynamics and how a team values its players in trades and free agency. On a broader level, ranking players is fun and helps fans better engage with the personalities of the sport they love.

To that end, we will do both right here. What follows is a ranking of each team’s best player, starting with the team with the least accomplished best player and ending with the true superstars of the NBA. These are not the top 30 players in the league, but rather what it would look like if each team sent its best player to a tournament.

We begin in California, just as we will end in California: