Sports Illustrated underrated a couple of LA Clippers’ players
Sports Illustrated unveiled their top 100 NBA players for the 2019-20 season. Several LA Clippers’ players made the list, but a couple were underrated.
Sports Illustrated finished unveiling their top 100 players for the upcoming season today, deeming Giannis Antetokounmpo as the number one overall player in the league. The LA Clippers were well represented on the list, most notably with Kawhi Leonard finishing second.
You can view the whole ranking here and check out which Clippers ranked where below.
- #81 – Patrick Beverley
- #77 – Montrezl Harrell
- #53 – Lou Williams
- #9 – Paul George
- #2 – Kawhi Leonard
According to SI, the list takes into account current injuries, past performances and anticipated improvement/decline. It does not take into account a player’s salary nor does the list include any rookies.
I won’t sit here and argue that Kawhi should be number one over Giannis after besting him in the playoffs. I definitely won’t argue PG being in the top ten even though he had surgeries on both shoulders this summer and we have no concrete idea of when he’ll actually play.
What I will argue is that Lou and Trezz were underrated.
Player 1 – 26.3 mpg, 16.6 ppg, 6.5 reb, 2.0 ast, 1.3 blk, 0.9 stl, 61.7 eFG%
Player 2 – 24.8 mpg, 14.1 ppg, 9.3 reb, 2.9 ast, 0.4 blk, 0.6 stl, 59.6 eFG%
Who is player one and who is player two? Well, both finished behind Lou Williams in Sixth Man of the Year voting this season. Player one is Trezz while two is Domantas Sabonis. The stats are similar, of course, which is why Sabonis was ranked just one spot ahead of Trezz at 76.
Still, if Trezz is doing everything better (except for rebounding and slightly assisting better) while not even being the true sixth man on his own team, shouldn’t he be considered the better player? There is the potential factor and Sabonis IS younger by three years, but we have seen Trezz expanding his game like crazy this summer.
Honestly, I would argue that both Trezz AND Sabonis are underrated and should be ahead of older players on the list that, while still good, don’t show much or any room for growth this season. Some examples include Ricky Rubio (73rd), J.J. Redick (67th) and Brook Lopez (66th). Derrick Favors is 55th! How!?
There really is quite a simple way to look at this list. If you took every player in the league and had a re-draft, guys who ranked 1-30 would be your primary options, with 30-60 being secondary options. The next group of guys would be your third options and so on and so on.
Maybe it’s bias, but how many teams are taking Trezz behind Favors, Rubio or Lopez in this hypothetical re-draft? Not many.
This brings us to Lou. His case is a little more difficult to argue. He’s in that “secondary option” group I just mentioned. When I say Lou was underrated, I simply mean that he probably could get bumped from 53rd and maybe into the top 50.
What players deserved to get bumped in my opinion? Glad you asked. Eric Bledsoe at 46 jumps out at me. There’s some recency bias from him playing so poorly in the playoffs, but I think an argument could be made that more GM’s would take Lou’s instant offense over Bledsoe’s up and down play.
Andre Drummond at 36 seems a little high as well, but I don’t think that if he dropped down in the ranks it would even effect Lou’s positioning. Garry Harris at 48 might be arguable as well, since we are only looking at this in the vacuum of the upcoming season. Maybe SI has Lou right.
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No matter how you feel about the rankings, it’s pretty great to see that the Clippers have five of the top 100 players in the league. What’s even cooler is that these five are likely going to be the group closing out games. Look out.