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Hollinger: 12 NBA players you may not know who will impact this season – The Athletic
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On the one hand, you have the players you’ve been hearing about all summer. Most notably, Damian Lillard and James Harden. Transactions (and potential transactions) have a way of doing that; they drive much of the conversation about the NBA.
On the other hand, there’s a season about to start, and there’s no rule that says players who change teams will end up being the ones who have the greatest impact on a team’s destiny. In fact, for several contending and quasi-contending hopefuls, holdover players or inexpensive, low-wattage free agents who aren’t household names are going to play a very important role in their outcomes.
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Take the Boston Celtics, for instance. They wowed the league with offseason trades for Kristaps Porziņģis and Jrue Holiday and will deservedly enter this season as one of the favorites for the championship.
But you know what else Boston did? It signed forward Oshae Brissett to a two-year minimum deal with a second-year player option. And it seems like that move is really going to matter too … maybe not as much as the Holiday and Porzingis deals, obviously, but a lot more than any discussion about it would indicate.
The 25-year-old Brissett fits a very important spot in the Boston roster as a 6 foot 7 combo forward who can do a little bit of everything. The Celtics sacrificed much of their depth from a year ago to pull off their two star trades, and as a result, are particularly thin at the wing and forward positions. While other possibilities dot the roster, they all present clear warts: Sam Hauser can shoot but gets hunted on defense; Dalano Banton is intriguing but can’t shoot at all; Svi Mykhailiuk is on his sixth team in three years; Jordan Walsh is a teenage rookie selected in the second round.
Brissett, then, is by far the best chance for Boston to get something above replacement-level production from what is the eighth spot in its rotation at full strength and a more prominent role if any of the top seven are out of the lineup. Despite being a bit undersized for the frontcourt, he mostly played the four in Indiana over the last four seasons, where he held up on the glass (12.0 percent career rebound rate) and showed good defensive awareness in a team concept. Sure, he’s not going to hold up on an island against elite guards in switches, but who is?
The wrinkle is what he can give the Celtics on offense, where his extremely meh results in Indiana were a big reason the Pacers went in search of other options this offseason. Brissett is a fifth option in most lineups, with limited shot-creation skills. He draws fouls at a fairly high rate for a role player but struggles to explode up around the basket and is near-hopeless from floater range (career 26.2 percent from 3 to 10 feet. Yikes).
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Can he shoot? Aye, there’s the rub. A 34.4 percent career marksman from 3, Brissett would likely need to convert at the upper end of that range to have real gravity on offense, something that might also make life easier for him on the catch-and-goes he seems to like. Perhaps Boston’s talent results in him taking more open shots and boosting the percentages a bit; perhaps, also, the normal improvement from somebody in his mid-20s lets him hit that level.
Either way, he’s a pretty important player whom absolutely nobody is talking about, someone who has a decent chance of getting minutes in an NBA Finals game this June. For what it’s worth, my numbers thought it was a pretty shrewd addition too: BORD$ valued him at $7.9 million for this year.
Brissett tops my list, but here are 11 other key players for this season whom you haven’t really heard much about:
With Bruce Brown and Jeff Green both gone from last year’s champions, the Nuggets will need somebody else to step up into rotation minutes and produce. While Christian Braun is an obvious candidate to take over as the sixth man, his fellow sophomore Peyton Watson — the 30th pick in the 2022 draft — could provide a more necessary ingredient as a big, athletic forward in the mold of the departed Green.
Drafted as a raw project out of UCLA after playing sparingly for the Bruins in his lone season there, Watson spent much of the season in Denver’s developmental lab (I wrote about their program in 2019, and basically all the same guys are still there) before getting snippets of opportunity late in the season.
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He showed obvious potential at the defensive end with his size and mobility, rejecting 11 shots in just 186 minutes, but the other interesting part was his shooting. Not in the games, necessarily (he made 6 of his 14 attempts in limited playing time but was only 3-of-21 in the G League), but if you watched the Nuggets warm up before them, you’d see Watson knocking down series of catch-and-shoot 3s.
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Given the limitations of Braun and other Denver bench candidates in that area, Watson becomes super interesting if he can make perimeter shots. And, I’ll add, important. The glow of a championship and the awesomeness of the starting five have led to many glossing over a potentially serious problem: There’s a chance this bench is as bad as any in the league. A breakout from Watson is probably the most plausible antidote to that outcome.
One thing that stands out about the Lakers roster is that they don’t have a lot of players in what you might call “the shooting guard size” profile. They’re over-indexed on big forwards who can masquerade as a three in the right lineup. But as far as natural fits at the two, it’s pretty much just Austin Reaves and Max Christie.
That opens a pretty massive door for Christie to walk through into rotation minutes in his second season, especially in the wake of his summer league emergence. The 35th pick in the 2022 NBA Draft was more sizzle than steak in his one year at Michigan State and didn’t make an impact as a rookie for the Lakers last season.
However, he showed massive improvement as a ballhandler and shot creator this July; the same guy who averaged 7.4 points on 27.3 percent shooting in his 2022 summer league boosted those numbers to 19.8 points on 49.2 percent shooting. Christie’s athleticism has never been in question, and his shooting form looks solid enough; can he carry the ball skills into a regular-season rotation role behind Reaves? If not, the Lakers will be left to paper over this spot by playing either smallish Gabe Vincent-D’Angelo Russell pairings or Frankenstein lineups with, say, Taurean Prince and Rui Hachimura as the wings.
Since we’re all overreacting to small preseason samples right now, I’ll note that Christie had 15 points in the Lakers’ preseason opener against Golden State. He has plenty of incentive to keep it up because, in a rarity for a second-round pick, he’ll be a restricted free agent in 2024 after just two seasons in the league.
The 52nd pick in the 2014 Draft by the Philadelphia 76ers, Vasilije Micić has taken a long path to the NBA after playing the last eight years overseas. Another product of the KK Mega development factory that produced Nikola Jokić, Ivica Zubac, Nikola Jović, Vlatko Čančar and Goga Bitadze, among other, Micić graduated to the highest levels of the EuroLeague with Anadolu Efes, where he played the last five seasons and was EuroLeague MVP in 2021.
A 29-year-old rookie, he comes over trying to reverse the trend line of recent veteran European point guard imports: Can he have more sticking power than Facundo Campazzo or Miloš Teodosić?
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Micić has strong credentials in his favor: He’s 6-4 and a natural passer whose dime clips have become very popular with basketball nerds. Plus, the wonky shot of his youth has been upgraded to 39.9 percent marksmanship from 3 and 88.8 percent from the line last season. Questions linger about his overall threat as an offensive player getting to the rim and how well he can guard the position, but you can file many of those same inquiries about every backup guard in the league. He should ably hold down the job behind Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and on the first year of a three-year, $22 million deal with a third-year team option, he’d be one of the better values at this position if he can be a plus backup.
For all the attention on their three star perimeter players, the Suns need a few of their minimum guys to deliver results too. And, in particular, they need somebody in the frontcourt to step up, as starting center Jusuf Nurkić has missed 56 games over the past two seasons.
Enter Drew Eubanks, who coincidentally was Nurkić’s backup in Portland last year as well. (He was not part of the Deandre Ayton trade but had already signed in Phoenix as a free agent.) He started 50 of the 56 games Nurkić missed, operating as a low-usage rim runner and shot blocker, and will play a similar role with the Suns. The undrafted 26-year-old from Oregon State is a bit undersized for this archetype at 6-9 but has a solid frame and gets off the floor; he rejected 3.1 shots per 100 possessions last season.
Another familiar element for Eubanks will be receiving the ball when opponents trap Kevin Durant or Devin Booker in pick-and-rolls and delivering it to the right place; he is not on par with Nurkić as a distributor, but he had a decent assist rate for a center.
The best version of the Grizzlies will happen this year if they can get one of their young, big wings to breakout. Memphis has used three recent first-round picks to select Jake LaRavia, David Roddy and Ziaire Williams and, of the three, Williams seems in the best position to deliver some results. Selected 10th in the 2021 draft, he was a sometimes-starter for the 56-win Grizzlies in 2021-22 but never totally clicked offensively and became an afterthought in the playoffs. Last season, an early injury knocked him off stride and he never found his way, finishing with a ghastly 7.4 PER.
Shooting will be the key. The eye test on his stroke is that it seems fine, but he’s made just 29.8 percent from 3 over his two NBA seasons after hitting 29.1 percent in his one season at Stanford. Defenses will ignore him until he proves he can make them pay from the perimeter, exacerbating a pre-existing problem in Memphis. If Williams can make 3s, however, the other elements are there for him to stabilize the forward rotation. He’s a career 61.9 percent shooter inside the arc, one who has teamed well with Ja Morant on transition alley-oops in particular.
Williams is 22 and can defend the position, especially at three where his lack of strength is less of an issue. This feels like a pivotal season for his future. If it doesn’t click, the Grizzlies will be forced to trade for better help at midseason.
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As a card-carrying Nickeil Alexander-Walker believer since the 2019 draft cycle, the last few years have been hard. Shoehorned into an on-ball role in New Orleans because of other injuries and roster issues, Alexander-Walker proved an overly thirsty scorer whose high-usage inefficiency blunted the other strengths in his game.
Two teams later, he’s finally playing the role meant for him as a 3-and-D wing, operating as a secondary creator or catch-and-shoot guy while guarding opponents’ top threats. He offered some additional proof of concept for that notion at the FIBA World Cup, hitting 38.5 percent from 3 as a supporting cast member of Canada’s bronze medal-winning squad. Alexander-Walker still needs to show he can knock down shots consistently at the NBA level, but last year’s career-best 38.4 percent from 3 is encouraging mark on that front; again, shot selection will help here.
Alexander-Walker only played 23 games for the Wolves after being traded from Utah, and offensively, he was better with the Jazz. Nonetheless, the outlines are there: 58 percent of his shots were 3s, and only 18 percent were non-rim 2s. Using greater discretion on his forays to the basket, he also shot over 60 percent at the rim for the first time in his career.
McDaniels quietly moved into a pretty significant role in Toronto, one that was underscored in the first preseason game when he spent huge chunks of the first half playing with two other 6-9 forwards (O.G. Anunoby and Pascal Siakam) in a big, switchable arrangement at the two-three-four spots. A low-key signing for a modest two years and $9 million with the biannual exception, he nonetheless fills a glaring hole in the Raptors’ rotation after Toronto’s bench flat-lined in 2022-23.
Of course, McDaniels still has to deliver on his end of the bargain. Philadelphia acquired him at the trade deadline in 2023 expecting similar results, but he quickly fell out of favor and saw just 36 seconds of clock in Philly’s last four playoff games. That isn’t an option this time around, as Toronto doesn’t really have another athletic combo forward to replace him; that’s especially true if first-rounder Gradey Dick isn’t part of the rotation, as he wasn’t on Sunday.
The good news for Toronto is that McDaniels seemed to fit right in, if one preseason game is any measure, with 11 points on five shots in the Raptors’ win over Sacramento. BORD$ rates him as an $11 million value, making him one of the best unrestricted free agent signings of the summer.
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While all the chatter in New Orleans is about Zion Williamson’s health and the notion of potentially playing him at center, his effectiveness also hinges on some undeniable truths: That this isn’t going to work unless the Pels put some quality shooting around him, and that the best hope for a knockdown shooter at the forward position (Trey Murphy) is currently out with a torn meniscus. Based on this team’s recent injury history, he will return in 2043.
Enter Marshall, the next man up in the search for a floor-spacing forward in New Orleans. Alas, thus far, Marshall has made more impact with his feel and floor game (5.1 assists per 100 from a role player!) than with his ability to stroke it from deep. Undrafted from Xavier, the 6-7 fourth-year Pel has made only 28.6 percent of his career offerings from 3, including 30.3 percent last season.
It may seem odd that I’m focusing on Marshall given his track record, but the other options (Larry Nance? Dyson Daniels? Herb Jones?) have even worse shooting histories. Marshall is their best chance to get weakside shooting while Murphy is out. Also, the possibility of Marshall lighting it up from 3 might be easier to dismiss were it not for the presence of Fred Vinson on the Pels’ coaching staff, the co-author of several other recent shooting miracles. Keep an eye on Marshall in the early part of the season; he could be low-key be really important.
Quin Snyder didn’t change too much when he arrived in Atlanta at midseason, but one move he made almost immediately was putting Johnson into the rotation ahead of AJ Griffin. With John Collins now traded (finally!) to Utah, it should open up even more minutes in the forward rotation for Johnson, a third-year pro from Duke who hardly played as a rookie.
He’ll be looking to convert more of his athletic-but-wild promise into consistent production this season, starting on the perimeter, where he made just 28.2 percent of his 3s in his first two seasons. Presenting a realistic weakside threat on a team that runs countless pick-and-rolls through its guards will obviously make his life easier, but in Johnson’s case, it’s especially salient because of the skills he’s already shown in other areas.
As a high-wire athlete, he’s not quite on Collins’ level, but he’s not too far away either. Johnson is a disruptive defender who averaged 3.3 stocks (steals + blocks) per 100 possessions, impacts the glass (14.8 percent rebound rate) and is a potent paint finisher who converted 72 percent of his shots at the rim last season. As the Hawks try to snap out of their two-year funk of meh averageness, Johnson’s talent could be a key swing variable.
Jović hardly played during Miami’s run to the NBA Finals last season, but departures from the Heat roster are likely to thrust him into a much more prominent role this season. Between the departures of Gabe Vincent and Max Strus and the Heat’s lack of free-agent activity in their Not Lillard Summer, the roster is paper thin from top to bottom. Additionally, the only true forwards on Miami’s bench are Jović, vagabond Haywood Highsmith and rookie Jaime Jaquez Jr.
The 6-10 Serbian also is one of the few non-centers on the Heat roster with legitimate positional size — this was a team that started 6-5 Caleb Martin at power forward for much of the postseason. As a result, the 20-year-old seems likely to be pressed into service whether or not he’s ready after his DNP-heavy apprenticeship a year ago that included just 15 appearances plus a seven-game stint in the G League.
So … can he play? The evidence so far is a mixed bag. Jović played two great games in the Sacramento summer league then two very blah ones in Vegas. He also suited up for FIBA World Cup runner-up Serbia this summer and put together a respectable tournament, including some flashes of playmaking and 11-of-26 marksmanship from 3. If he can be a legit stretch four threat who adds some ballhandling spice, then the Heat will likely feel a lot better about their rotation and overall depth.
Chicago went 13-9 with Patrick Beverley as a starter during last year’s stretch run and nearly beat eventual finalist Miami in the Play-In. Beverley is gone, but the Bulls signed a younger, less hyper facsimile in Jevon Carter, a ball-pressure fiend who also made 42.1 percent of his 3-pointers for the Bucks last season. (Full disclosure: I was with the Grizzlies when they selected Carter with the 32nd pick in 2018.)
Much as with Beverley, Carter isn’t going to create a ton of offense on the ball and struggles to score inside the arc (40.5 percent career on 2s). But the glass-half-full scenario in Chicago is that the Bulls have enough other ball-in-hand options with Zach LaVine, DeMar DeRozan and Coby White. If he can knock down open shots consistently and bring his brand of defense to a Bulls team that ranked fifth in that category a year ago, then there’s at least hope the Bulls can ride that late-season run from last spring into a playoff charge for 2023-24.
(Photo of Jalen Johnson, Nikola Jović and Peyton Watson: Brett Davis, Petre Thomas, Ron Chenoy / USA Today)
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John Hollinger ’s two decades of NBA experience include seven seasons as the Memphis Grizzlies’ Vice President of Basketball Operations and media stints at ESPN.com and SI.com. A pioneer in basketball analytics, he invented several advanced metrics — most notably, the PER standard. He also authored four editions of “Pro Basketball Forecast.” In 2018 he was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Follow John on Twitter @johnhollinger