Every NBA team has a best player, no matter how good they are. How would we rank every team’s best player in 2020-21 from 1 to 30?
The NBA is a league of stars. Fans tune in to watch the personalities and the stellar play, and the titles are decided by each team’s star talent. From Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant to LeBron James and Stephen Curry, the league has always run on star talent.
Teams don’t win championships without top-10 stars, and usually not without a top-5 star. LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Kawhi Leonard have won the last nine titles between them. Tim Duncan, Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe and Jordan won 18 of the 20 titles before that. The 1980s saw eight of nine go to either Bird or Magic. Stars stir the drink in basketball. If you don’t have any, you’re on the outside looking in.
That isn’t to say every team doesn’t have its own stars, as the hierarchy of basketball demands it. Inside of each rotation one or two players rise to the top, both in the offensive pecking order and in terms of salary. For one team their best player may be the 75th best player in the league, but he’s still something of a star on his team. Other teams, the title contenders, may have two or three “stars” vying for the spot of best player on their own team.
To that end, who is the best player on every team in the league? And while we are at it, how do those players stack up against each other? What follows is a ranking of each team’s best player. This leaves out the secondary and tertiary stars on contending teams; we all know Anthony Davis is better than Mitchell Robinson, but this list only cares about a team’s singular best. Perhaps we’ll do another list of top second bananas.
A few thoughts. This is the third consecutive season we have done this ranking. Check out former iterations for 2018-19 and 2019-20. From last year’s list, 18 of 30 teams have the same best player. Four teams (Memphis, New York, Atlanta and Boston) had a younger play rise into that role for the first time. Oklahoma City and New Orleans had last year’s best player leave the team, while Charlotte is the only team to add a new best player. Four teams had a close choice between last year’s veteran choice and this year’s. Finally, the Brooklyn Nets had their best player return from injury.
We begin in the Big Apple, where a young center takes the spot by default.