How 2024 NBA Playoffs Have Shaped the League's Top 10 Player Rankings (2024)

The NBA regular season is 82 games. A team can play a maximum of 28 more in the playoffs.

But it's that second season, the postseason, that largely drives our conversations about who the league's best player is.

Never mind the lack of variety (you play the same team four to seven times in a row, then move on to the next series), at least relative to the regular season. Never mind the fact that winning 16 games and a championship is a team accomplishment.

Media, fandom and the basketball world at large view these pressure-packed, high-stakes performances as the ultimate test of an individual player's worthiness.

And honestly, at least to an extent, that's fair.

Trades, the draft, free agency, summer workouts and leagues, the preseason and the regular season all builds to one thing. The entire point is winning the title.

And in basketball, when teams only have five players on the floor at a time, superstars have a bigger impact on that pursuit than they do in soccer, baseball or even football (though quarterbacking seems to become more important every year).

So, it should come as no surprise that despite winning back-to-back MVPs and having three of the greatest statistical seasons in NBA history, plenty of people were reluctant to accept Nikola Jokić as the best player in the world till he won a title in 2023.

That run undoubtedly changed the Serb's profile, but not for long. After being eliminated in the second round this year, the debate seems to be open again. And a very real challenger for the crown, Luka Dončić, is still playing.

If the Dallas Mavericks win the Finals, you can guarantee some will have him in the No. 1 spot. If the Boston Celtics do, it'll be hard to keep Jayson Tatum out of the top five.

There's still a little molding of the order left to be done. The NBA Finals have a knack for doing that, but the first three rounds have had their influence, too.

As we brace for this final series of the 2023-24 campaign, here's how the top 10 shakes out after nearly two months of playoff action.

Two years ago, no one could have predicted Jalen Brunson would be a top-10 player at any point in his career. There was no real indication that by 2024, having him at No. 10 would actually feel a little conservative.

But that's one of the beauties of basketball—specifically, the NBA.

Almost every year, something surprises us, and Brunson has now done it. Twice.

He beat expectations in his first season with the New York Knicks and then finished fifth in MVP voting in 2023-24. And during this most recent playoff run, he averaged 32.4 points, 7.5 assists and 2.0 threes.

As the Knicks seemingly lost a player in every other game to injury, Brunson carried them through two series with timely shot-making and his ability to draw fouls and manipulate defenses as a ball-handler.

There may still be a ceiling on what most teams led by small guards can ultimately accomplish, but Brunson has spent much of the last two years challenging that perception.

Catch-all metrics from around the internet suggested Anthony Edwards was somewhere in the top 20-25 range this regular season, and even that feels ahead of schedule for a 22-year-old still playing on his rookie contract.

But then the 2020 No. 1 pick found an entirely different level in the playoffs (something he's also done in each of the last three seasons).

Edwards led a sweep of Kevin Durant and the Phoenix Suns. He helped knock out the reigning champion Denver Nuggets in a series that included a 20-point, second-half comeback in a Game 7 on the road.

And though the Georgia product slowed down a bit in the conference finals, he finished the postseason with averages of 27.6 points, 7.0 rebounds, 6.5 assists and 2.9 threes, while shooting 40.0 percent from deep.

Defensive consistency and better reads as a playmaker and pick-and-roll ball-handler (he also averaged 3.3 turnovers in the playoffs) are the next logical steps, but he already looks like the league's next superstar wing.

His union of explosive athleticism, skill and aesthetics is the closest thing we've seen to Michael Jordan since Kobe Bryant, and Edwards still has years left to improve.

This ranking may be paying a bit too much respect to Stephen Curry's past. The same catch-all numbers mentioned in the Edwards slide have him outside the top 10 for 2023-24.

And the point of this exercise was to examine how the postseason may have shifted our perceptions of players. Curry is the only one on the list whose team didn't even make the playoffs.

However, that had as much (and probably more) to do with multiple suspensions for Draymond Green, Klay Thompson adjusting to various roles throughout the season, and the organization's two-timeline approach that's forced young players into real roles over the years.

As an individual player, even at 36 years old, Curry still commands about as much attention as he ever has. His off-ball movement and outside shooting ability can scramble entire defenses in a way no one else can.

And even if his numbers were down a bit from where they've been in previous years, 26.4 points, 5.1 assists and 4.8 threes, with a 40.8 three-point percentage is still more than enough from a team's best player, assuming the rest of the squad is a bit more stable than the 2023-24 Golden State Warriors were.

This should be impossible. LeBron James turns 40 in December, but he's still comfortably playing at an All-NBA level.

His Los Angeles Lakers may have been eliminated in the first round by the reigning champion Nuggets, but it's hard to fault him for that. In those five games, he averaged 27.8 points, 8.8 assists, 2.4 steals and 2.0 threes while shooting 63.0 percent on twos and 38.5 percent from three.

Somehow, despite being in the NBA for over two decades and having more in-game mileage on his feet than any other player in league history, James remains one of the NBA's absolute best point forwards and tacticians.

He's not the athlete he was at the peak of his powers, but he's still among the most explosive players in the league.

There are games and moments when it looks like James is recharging or saving energy on defense, but we can grant him a little leeway on that. He's truly doing things we've never seen from a player his age (or close to it).

Joel Embiid won MVP in 2022-23 and would have had an even better case for the award in 2023-24 had a meniscus injury not sidelined him for several weeks.

In the regular season, he averaged 34.7 points, 11.0 rebounds and a career-high 5.6 assists. He finished with a total of 1,353 points in 1,309 minutes, becoming the first player since Wilt Chamberlain to tally more points than minutes for a season.

But if we're going to weight postseason performance more than the regular season in determining the NBA's best player, that standard needs to be applied evenly across the board.

For most of his career, the 30-year-old has ducked criticism for failing to make a deep playoff run to this point. Injuries have typically played a role, but his career postseason box plus/minus of 4.1 is well shy of the 7.0 he has in the regular season. Ditto for his career scoring numbers, which go from 27.9 points with a 53.6 effective field-goal percentage in the regular season to 24.9 with a 49.1 effective field-goal percentage in the playoffs.

Prior to his MVP nod, Embiid told Shams Charania of The Athletic that he didn't "care about the pressure that everybody puts on [him]" to win because he didn't have the same accolades as Nikola Jokić (he didn't mention him by name, but the implication was clear).

The accolades, including an MVP, are piling up now, though. This year, the Philadelphia 76ers were again knocked out in the first round.

As mentioned at the top, that's a team result. Embiid doesn't deserve all (or even most) of the blame for another early exit. But he's the best player and face of the franchise. And at this point, we almost have to expect he'll be banged up or otherwise somehow short of 100 percent in the postseason.

That has to matter in player rankings.

In a vacuum or in a one-off under ideal circ*mstances, Embiid is a better player than Tatum. He scores more efficiently and he's a defensive anchor. But basketball isn't played in a vacuum, and it's often well outside ideal circ*mstances.

And it's time to give Tatum a little credit for his consistency, availability and the fact that he just flat-out wins.

When you include the postseason, he has played almost 89 games per year during his career. As of the start of the Finals, he's 26 years and 95 days old. Kobe Bryant is the only player in NBA history who had more playoff points through that age. Kobe and Tony Parker are the only players who had more playoff minutes through that age.

On the game's biggest stage, despite being a few years shy of his prime, Tatum has become a productivity metronome. He's averaged at least 25 points, five rebounds, four assists and a steal in each of the last five postseasons. In three of those runs, he averaged at least 25, 10 and five.

Tatum might not be the kind of heliocentric offensive engine that players like Dončić and Jokić are, but he hasn't really had to be. On a team as deep and versatile as Boston, his steady scoring, multipositional defense and availability have been enough to get him to five conference finals and two NBA Finals.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is coming off back-to-back campaigns in which he averaged at least 30 points, eight free-throw attempts and five assists, while shooting at least 53 percent on twos and 87 percent from the line.

And in his first real postseason run as the No. 1 guy, those numbers didn't really drop off for SGA. His team was knocked out in the second round, but that had more to do with the lack of playoff experience for teammates like Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren.

They'll all be back, and that especially includes Gilgeous-Alexander.

SGA turns 26 in July and just finished second in MVP voting. His ability to get to his spots and connect from the mid-range is just about unparalleled. His size (6'6" with a 6'11" wingspan) is elite for a guard and makes him a pest in passing lanes.

For the foreseeable future, he'll be in the mix for top-five status.

To a certain extent, Giannis Antetokounmpo deserves the same line of criticism Embiid got above.

He missed this playoff run with an injury. He averaged 23.3 points and was eliminated in the first round last year. And the year before that, Tatum and the Celtics knocked him out in the second round.

During that run, his postseason effective field-goal percentage is 51.0, compared to 59.3 in the regular season. Defenses have been more willing to overcommit to his drives in the playoffs, and his lack of a jump shot has hurt his numbers and his team.

But there's a pretty obvious and massive distinction between the two. Giannis has already banked a championship, and he more than lived up to the Greek Freak nickname in the Finals. In that series, Giannis got to at least 40 points three times. He scored 50 in the closeout game and averaged 35.2 points, 13.2 rebounds, 5.0 assists, 1.8 blocks and 1.2 steals.

In that Finals and against most opponents throughout the regular season, Antetokounmpo's inside-centric offense is completely unstoppable. In fact, in 2023-24, he actually leaned further into that, cut down his three-point attempts and saw his scoring efficiency soar.

The 29-year-old is an offensive force of nature. When he gets the ball, possessions are almost guaranteed to end with him getting a decent shot for himself or others. And his ability to both protect the rim and defend wings outside makes him one of the game's most versatile defenders.

Shooting is the game's most important skill, and it doesn't look like he'll ever be great at that, but he does just about everything else one can do on a basketball court at an elite level.

As mentioned at the top, the clamoring for Luka Dončić to be considered the best in the world will get much louder if Dallas upsets the Celtics. But there's already a real argument to have him at No. 1.

No one can control every aspect of a possession quite like he can right now. He can manipulate any individual defender or defensive scheme with his timing, size and knack for knowing when to change speeds as a ball-handler.

The 25-year-old has become a nightmarishly good pull-up jump shooter. This season, he made 3.2 pull-up threes per game and hit 37.8 percent of his attempts. The league average for all three-point attempts was 36.6.

His finishing inside, whether over big men, after one of his deceleration moves or otherwise, was absurd. Among the 236 players with at least 150 attempts within three feet of the basket, Luka's 83.8 field-goal percentage led the league.

That was just ahead of teammate Dereck Lively II's 83.3, a number that was helped by playing with Dončić. Just shy of 80 percent of those Lively makes were assisted. Only 26.9 percent of the Slovenian's were.

It looks a little different, but this level of self-creation and finishing is right on par with peak LeBron. And of course, he's not just playing for himself.

Dončić is ultimately a shoot-first player, but he was third in the league in potential assists this season. His vision and accuracy as a passer out of any set, but particularly when breaking down defenses from the pick-and-roll is absurd, all-time-level stuff.

And while it's fair for people to pick at his defense—yes, there are times when he's caught relaxing off ball or getting blown by on the perimeter—his size, defensive rebounding and knack for getting steals (he's averaging 1.6 this postseason) are all helpful traits.

Even if you want to say he's a slight negative on that end of the floor, the positive impact of his offense overwhelmingly makes up for any disadvantage there.

It shouldn't have taken the 2023 championship for people to accept that Nikola Jokić had been the best player in the NBA for a while. That was a team accomplishment, and the Denver Nuggets were without Jamal Murray for the two postseasons prior to that.

Let me know how many title runs you can come up with in which the winning team was missing its second best player the entire way.

For similar reasons, Denver's early exit at the hands of the Timberwolves shouldn't knock Jokić off the throne.

Yes, he's the face of the franchise. Yes, he deserves some of the blame and will certainly receive much of it. But the Serb averaged 29.0 points, 11.4 rebounds, 7.9 assists, 1.6 steals and 1.0 blocks in that series.

Denver's top three in regular-season threes per game (Michael Porter Jr., Jamal Murray and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope) shot 34.0 percent from deep against Minnesota. And the Nuggets only converted 50.9 percent of Jokić's potential assists in the second round (compared to 60.6 percent throughout the regular season).

Just like 2023 was a team triumph for Denver, 2024 was a team failure.

A better way to assess Jokić and his place in the "best in the world" conversation is a bit more zoomed out.

Over the last four seasons, he's won three MVPs (and should've won a fourth) and averaged 26.1 points, 12.2 rebounds, 8.7 assists and 1.4 steals in 294 games. His 66.3 true shooting percentage over that stretch is a whopping 8.9 points clear of the league average. His plus-2,150 raw plus-minus leads the NBA during those years (by a wide margin), in spite of significant injuries and absences for Murray and Porter.

If advanced numbers are more your speed, his 13.0 box plus/minus ("...a basketball box score-based metric that estimates a basketball player's contribution to the team when that player is on the court") is the highest in NBA history for a 294-game span.

And in case you're wondering, his playoff performance really doesn't lag at all behind those absurd regular-season marks. In fact, you could argue he gets even better when the lights are brighter.

Over the last four postseasons, Jokić has averaged 29.7 points, 13.0 rebounds, 7.9 assists, 1.6 threes, 1.1 steals and 0.9 blocks, while shooting 58.5 percent from two and 37.0 percent from three.

Dončić is closing the gap, but Jokić's absurd touch around the rim and from the mid-range, his almost preternatural instincts as a playmaker, his sheer size on both ends and his ability to dominate the glass are keeping him in the pole position for this debate.