Ranking the Most Underrated NBA Players

The NBA is a star’s league, but sometimes the constant focus on the biggest names leaves others with less attention than they deserve. Chances are, if you make your living on defense or in ways that statistics don’t catch as easily as, say, points, you’re flying under the radar.

Here, we’re going to celebrate players who’ve made significant contributions to their teams for years—even if too few have noticed.

We’ve got so-called plodding centers, a savvy two-way forward, a defensive menace and even the best three-point sniper everyone forgets about. None of them has ever made an All-Star team, and it’ll be a shock if that changes any time soon. But every entry on our top-five list of the league’s most underrated players is a star in his role.

Let’s give each of them some shine.

Steven Adams has made one three-point shot in his entire career, has fewer total blocks over the last five seasons than Robert Covington and Montrezl Harrell, and has virtually none of the new-age skills that get centers recognized.

He is, however, an old-school master of the big-man dark arts.

Adams is perhaps the most physical player in the league, an ambulatory granite statue that only moves when it wants to. When not using his unparalleled strength to carve out rebounding position or set screens that knock fillings loose, he’s harnessing his skills as an irritant—grabbing a handful of jersey here or rubbing his sweaty forehead on an opponent’s shoulder there.

The combination of pure strength and impish guile is a weird one, but it works—particularly for the Memphis Grizzlies, who need Adams’ best-in-class contributions on the offensive glass to generate half-court offense. Memphis is 79-39 when Adams plays and 28-18 without him over the last two years, the difference between a 55-win pace and a 49-win pace across an 82-game season.

Every year since 2015-16, Adams’ teams have had significantly better net ratings with him in the game. Five times during that span, his presence on the floor has boosted his club’s point differential by at least 7.0 points per 100 possessions, an elite figure.

Adams is one of the best centers in the league, but nobody seems to notice it because he does it in such unassuming, throwback fashion.

If you had to name the Minnesota Timberwolves’ best defensive player, it’d take a while before you got to Kyle Anderson. But he graded out better than four-time DPOY Rudy Gobert in Defensive Estimated Plus/Minus last season, and he also topped Jaden McDaniels, who could land a $100 million contract extension before the 2023-24 season kicks off—largely on the strength of his defensive prowess.

We have to be careful here because a catch-all metric, especially on D, is too noisy to make a definitive argument. But the fact that there’s any data suggesting…