Ranking the Most Underrated NBA Players – Bleacher Report

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 Anderson is even in the conversation with those two proves he’s underrated.
Further evidence on that front: Only 27 players in NBA history with at least 12,000 minutes have block and steal rates above 2.0 percent. Anderson is one of them, occupying space alongside the likes of generational defenders like David Robinson, Hakeem Olajuwon, Shawn Marion, Ben Wallace, Andre Kirilenko and Draymond Green.
In addition to the length and anticipation that make the 6’9″ Anderson a high-end stopper, we must add elite passing for a forward. The 29-year-old has ranked in the 86th percentile or better in assist percentage at his position every year since 2017-18, and he’s rated even higher in assist-to-usage ratio, which captures how effective Anderson is as a facilitator, despite relatively little time on the ball.

Twenty-seven players have hit at least 700 total three-pointers over the last five seasons, a crew of high-volume gunners populated by loads of household names. Stephen Curry, Damian Lillard, Donovan Mitchell, Jayson Tatum—the usual suspects, basically.
Of that 27-man group, only four managed to clear the 700-make threshold while making at least 40.0 percent of their attempts. You’ve got Curry at 41.4 percent, Bojan Bogdanović at 40.4 percent and Buddy Hield narrowly qualifying with 40.0 percent on the button.
The last member of this quartet of the league’s top marksmen is Joe Harris, but he has basically lapped the field in accuracy. He sits at a ridiculous 45.2 percent since 2018-19, making him far and away the most accurate high-volume shooter in the game.
Not all shots are created equal, and players like Curry create far more of their own (more difficult) looks than a spot-up weapon like Harris does. But in an NBA that seems to value reliable shooting more with each passing season, the 31-year-old, who’ll play for the Detroit Pistons this season after spending the last seven years with the Brooklyn Nets, deserves notice for heading such a remarkable list.
Harris started just 33 games last season and only appeared in 14 while battling ankle issues in 2021-22. But when he’s on the floor, there simply isn’t anyone more dangerous in space. Even in a “down year” in 2022-23, Harris canned 42.6 percent of his triples.
Somehow, the guy who’s been better at what’s rapidly becoming the NBA’s defining skill doesn’t get his due. Hopefully this helps.

It’s not just that Kevon Looney has more titles, two*, than any other active starting NBA center that makes him underrated. Any fair analysis of his game, ring count and impact must include the fact that he has spent his entire career with the Golden State Warriors surrounded by Hall of Fame talent.
Still, there’s something to be said for understanding how to function optimally in support of stars. And Looney is great at that.
Short of a superstar 5 who carries his team to championships (see: Nikola Jokić), the Warriors’ undersized big man offers everything a team could ask for in a playoff-proven package.
He outplayed bruising Sacramento Kings All-Star center Domantas Sabonis in the first round of the 2023 playoffs, racking up three games with at least 20 rebounds and earning praise from the same teammates who watched him ably handle switches onto Luka Dončić, an entirely different kind of threat, in the 2022 postseason.
"Everything started with Kevon."<br><br>Draymond explains why Loon is to credit for the Dubs' effort on defense today <a href="https://t.co/DQV4nca0rP">pic.twitter.com/DQV4nca0rP</a>
Though Stephen Curry is the catalyst for everything the Warriors do and should always be the first entry on the list of reasons Golden State can contend, Looney is amassing a playoff track record that puts him close behind. Most teams are happy when their center doesn’t get played off the floor against top competition. The Warriors, conversely, would probably prefer to play Looney all 48 minutes if they could.
Steve Kerr: "I think (Kevon) Looney is one of the best centers in the league." <a href="https://t.co/j3ODtAWFjx">pic.twitter.com/j3ODtAWFjx</a>
Whether serving as the conscience of the locker room for a dynastic core, running the complex handoff game with Curry and Klay Thompson better than anyone but Draymond Green or miraculously playing all 82 games for two straight years in the age of load management, Looney never gets the credit he’s due.
*Plus a third from 2016-17, when he was on the Warriors’ roster but didn’t play in the postseason.

It’s simply harder for guards to make defensive impacts at the same scale as their big-man counterparts. Centers who can defend the rim, hoard boards and disrupt huge swaths of the opposing offense’s operating space just matter more in the grand defensive scheme.
That’s part of the reason Marcus Smart, the 2021-22 Defensive Player of the Year, was the first guard to win the award since 1996.
Alex Caruso is one of the rare players at his position—like Smart, Jrue Holiday, Derrick White and a handful of others—who can change the course of a game defensively. The problem: He doesn’t get nearly enough recognition for it.
Consider the mystery of last year’s Chicago Bulls, who somehow finished with the No. 5 defense despite starting notable sieves Nikola Vucević, DeMar DeRozan and Zach LaVine. The Bulls managed that feat largely because they held opponents to 106.5 points per 100 possessions when Caruso was on the floor. When he sat, that number leapt to 112.5.
With steal rates in or above the 90th percentile five years running (and even a 98th percentile block rate last year!) and the most deflections per 36 minutes in the league (among players with at least 1,000 minutes played), Caruso causes more trouble than most defenders—at any position.
Lastly, he finished first in the entire NBA in Defensive Estimated Plus/Minus in 2022-23. And yet if quizzed on the league’s best defenders, most fans would list 10 or 15 names before getting to Caruso’s.
That needs to change.
Stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball Reference and Cleaning the Glass. Salary info via Spotrac.
Grant Hughes covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter (@gt_hughes), and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, where he appears with Bleacher Report’s Dan Favale.

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