Why Anthony Davis is #10 in my NBA player rankings | Dallas Mavericks

Why Anthony Davis is #10 in my NBA player rankings | Dallas Mavericks

All right, welcome to Hoops tonight here at the volume. Happy Monday everybody. Hope all of you guys had a great weekend. We are starting the top 10 of our player rankings today with number 10 Anthony Davis. Gonna do a very deep dive into AD, some of the ups and downs of his career with relation to health, also with relation to his skill development. I even want to zoom out a little bit towards the end and talk about his uh perception of the center position versus the power forward position and some of the strengths and weaknesses of that approach and some of the things we got to keep an eye out for him with the Dallas Mavericks in that regard. And then at the tail end of the show, one of the things we’re going to start doing since we’re only doing one player at a time from this point forward is we’re going to start hitting some uh bigger picture basketball debate types of topics. And today we’re actually going to start with one that was a raging debate online last week while while I was in Alaska. And I gave you guys just a very quick kind of like 30,000 foot version of my opinion. But I wanted to kind of dive deeper into the concept. And it’s about two basketball players, one of which is a champion, one of which is not. However, the player who’s not a champion is a guy that I view as the better basketball player. And I want to kind of dive into that concept. It’s Kyrie Irving versus Chris Paul. And who I think is a better basketball player at their absolute peak. So, we’re going to dive into that at the tail end of the show. You guys know the drill. Before we get started, subscribe to the Hoops Tonight YouTube channel so you don’t miss any more of our videos. Follow me on Twitter_JLT so you guys don’t miss show announcements. Don’t forget about our podcast feed wherever we get your podcast under Hoops Tonight. It’s also super helpful if you leave a rating and a review on that front. Jackson’s also doing incredible work on our social media feeds on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tik Tok. Make sure you guys follow us there. And last but not least, if you disagree with any of these rankings in any way, shape, or form, we are doing Friday mailbags throughout the remainder of this series where you guys have the opportunity to explain why you disagree. A guy too high, guy too low, whatever it might be. Just write mailbag with a colon. Write your elevator pitch just as concisely as possible, your basketball case for why you disagree with a ranking. or even if it’s just something you want me to elaborate on a bit further, put that in the YouTube comments and we’ll get the get to those in our Friday mailbags throughout the remainder of this series. All right, let’s talk some basketball. So, number 10, Anthony Davis. His last season in review played in just 51 games. We’re going to talk about AD and kind of his history with health here in a little bit. Came out guns blazing to start the year as he was very heavily featured in JJ Reick’s offense early in the season. In his first 25 games, he averaged a super efficient 28 points per game to go with 3.2 steals plus blocks per game. He was legit playing at that top tier superstar level to start the season. Then he got a little banged up. He starting to deal with a couple of nagging injuries and he slowed down pretty significantly after that point. He averaged just 23 points per game on lower efficiency over his final 17 games as a Laker. Also, as he started to not perform as well on offense, he started to become less and less featured in the offense, which seemed to take him even further out of rhythm. It just was starting to look like more or less the offensive player that we had seen in previous seasons. But he did come out guns blazing to start the year. And then he ended up finally succumbing to a groin injury which kept him out the majority of the rest of the season. He ended up playing just nine games as a Dallas Maverick after the Luca Donuch trade. finished the year in the total of the 51 games at 25 points, 12 rebounds, and four assists. 3.4 stocks per game and his percentages 54% from the field, 28% from three, 78% from the line, which amounts to 54% in effective field goal percentage weighted for threes, and 59% in true shooting. This is where I want to start in the the health arena for just a minute because it’s always an important context with AD. AD has a pretty large gap between what his potential ceiling is and what his potential floor is relative to some of these guys. Like there’s a case to be made that he belongs in that Kawhi Leonard Joel Beard grouping closer to the to the bottom of this tier. I disagree because I think he’s considerably more reliable than those two guys, but there are going to be people who disagree with this ranking based on the idea that AD is not healthy enough. And there is some legitimacy to that argument. I was hopeful as a Lakers fan that after that 2024 season, which if you remember that was a return to form for AD from the standpoint of his health, he played in 76 games. He made the AllNBA team, second team allNBA, which was his first time making an AllNBA team since the 2020 season when they won the title. And so it looked like is this going to be the se like the the segment of AD’s career where he kind of figures out the health stuff and he starts to be more available and he just couldn’t in the following season goes for 51 games suffers a groin injury soft tissue injury pretty sim similar to some of the injuries he had had early in earlier in his Lakers tenure. So if you zoom out in the four seasons surrounding Anthony Davis’s 76game AllNBA season, he averages 46 games played, 36 games in 2021, 40 games in 2022, 56 in 2023, and 51 in 2025. So now when when I look at him relative to the Embiid Kawawaii tier, first of all, Joel Embiid and Kawhai are both dealing with severe degenerative issues in their knees. Issues that have completely uh uh dominated this phase of their careers and have been recurring in the same knee. And that makes them, in my opinion, significantly less reliable than an Anthony Davis who’s just been dealing with some soft tissue related injuries and for the most part doesn’t have any sort of big glaring like ooh that part of his body is likely to break down this season. So I think he’s a little bit safer there. And then another part of it is the motivation element with with him being involved in the Luca Donuch trade, which we’ll get to in a little bit. But I think it’s been a combination of three factors that have led to Anthony Davis’s health issues. First of all, luck. Like it or not, there is some kind of ethereal injury luck factor that’s at play that affects all athletes. Some dudes just break down more. And it’s not because of anything they’re doing. It’s it’s just something that exists there, that injury-prone factor. And AD is certainly one of those dudes who just happens to get hurt more than some of his peers. Secondly, conditioning. AD deserves some of the blame with respect to his injury history because it’s been widely reported that especially in the few years after they won the title, AD would show up to camp out of shape. It would take long stretches of the summer off and it led to a situation where he wasn’t as well conditioned to start seasons as some of his peers at the top of the league. And that certainly didn’t help matters with his health. Right? If you look at it as like a spectrum of possible outcomes within the regard or within the uh range of of his injuryrone nature, he’s been tilting more towards the injured size side of it in large part, I shouldn’t say in large part, partially because of the fact that he didn’t come into into these seasons in as good a shape as he could have come in. Lastly, he put on an insane amount of muscle. This is a concept we’re going to talk a lot about today with AD, which I thought was a miscalculation on his part in terms of his development. The reason why is it flat out came at the expense of his foot speed. We’ve all seen the videos when a video pops up of Anthony Davis playing basketball in that 2020 season. Doesn’t even look like the same guy. He looks considerably thinner. He was moving considerably better and it made him a more dynamic player in a bunch of different ways. AD got shoved around in a couple of matchups uh especially when he was playing center during that phase of his career in that 2020 2021 stage and so he decided he needed to bulk up and I thought it was a classic example of overindexing on addressing a weakness rather than leaning into your strengths. That’s not to say that you don’t want to address your weaknesses. Certainly AD should have put on some muscle as every super thin player that comes into the league should. As we talk about Victor Wimyama, he’ll face a similar decision in his career. How much should he bulk up? Certainly needs to bulk up some, but he doesn’t want to bulk up so much that it comes at the expense of his speed, which is the thing at his size that makes him such a transcendently great athlete. And what happened was is AD’s newfound muscle mass really wasn’t helping him win as many physical battles as you’d think. Basketball is every bit as much about leverage and angles as it is about just pure strength and muscle mass. This is a big part of why I’ve been gravitating towards those like shorter stockier wings over some of the longer lankier wings because it doesn’t really like length is of the highest factor at the rim. It certainly helps on the perimeter when you’re contesting shots. I don’t want to pretend it doesn’t, but it has its largest impact on the game at the rim. And if you can win battles on the ground as a stocky athlete on the perimeter that can prevent guys from even getting past you, that carries a lot of value in the league and prevents some of that length at the rim from being as much of a factor. That’s why I gravitate towards some of those shorter, stockier wings, right? And that’s the thing, like AD put on all this muscle and then he still in the last few years would get bullied by Jokic and bullied by Sabonis at times, although he won that battle a couple times last year or like even guys like Ysef Nerk sometimes would bury him on the offensive glass. Zubots gave him a lot of issues on the offensive glass. And then the problem was is even though he had all this muscle and he still kind of struggling with some of these bigger centers, he also at the same time was not as capable of punishing those guys with his speed because he wasn’t as fast as he used to be and he lost a lot of that in the pursuit of that muscle mass. And then I mean you got to factor that in with the injuries as well. like it made him heavier. And if you’re heavier, your lower body is going to struggle to hold up under the wear and tear of moving your body around. And so really as we zoom out, the injuries have been the thing that has prevented AD from reaching his individual ceiling, his ultimate potential, which was like like there’s a version of AD’s career where he’s healthier and he’s thinner and he holds up more, which allows him to be in the gym more, which allows him to develop more in terms of his skill set, which allows him to build more of a rhythm in the season and develop into something closer to the Giannises of the world and the hyper versatile bigs that ranked above him on this list. The Joel Embiid when he was healthy, for example. There’s a version of AD’s career where he had better health luck and he took, you know, took a different approach in terms of how he built his body and maybe he was a more skilled player that reached higher heights. But I do think all of those factors played a role in his injury history earlier in his career. So, I have him in the top 10 ahead of guys like Kevin Durant and Donovan Mitchell. 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New customers, bet $5 and get $200 in bonus bets instantly. Download the DraftKings Sportsbook app and use code Hoops. That’s code hoops. That’s H O Ps for new customers to get $200 in bonus bets instantly when you bet just five bucks. In partnership with DraftKings Sportsbook, the crown is yours. I’m obviously a huge believer in Anthony Davis’s impact on basketball games. That goes without saying. Anybody who’s listened to the show over the last few years knows I’m a huge believer in 80, but it also extends into what I believe will be a revenge campaign from him this year. Both Anthony Davis and Luca Donuch will be ranked on this list higher, much higher than what their previous seasons justify. AD has no case to be a top 10 player based solely on last season. And Luca Donuch has no case to be a top five player based solely on last season. But we’ve already seen a completely different looking Luca in a game with Slovenia against Germany. There were three moves in particular, a Euro step, a move driving, a close out, and there was one more. I can’t remember exactly what it was. I think it was just like a jab step uh behind the back dribble off the right wing in the first half. But he had three moves in that game where I was like, that’s a different guy. He He’s moving at a completely different speed than he moved in the past. Why? Because he got embarrassed by the Mavs. Completely embarrassed by the Mavs and he’s super pissed off and he lost a bunch of weight and now he’s on a mission to prove everybody wrong. And as we’re looking towards next season, I’m factoring that in. Same goes for AD. AD was similarly embarrassed. He was basically shipped off as trade filler in the dead of night. It it was unprecedented for a Lakers star. It’s unprecedented in the entire NBA. It was the craziest trade in the history of the NBA. How often do you see a superstar, not Demar D Rozan getting traded for Kawhai, but a superstar that gets moved in pursuit of a better player in his prime because the team wanted the even better player. It’s so rare. And so AD has been similarly embarrassed. I think he wants to prove everyone wrong. I do think we will say see AD come into training camp in great shape relative to previous seasons from him, which I think will lead to him having a healthier season by his standards, which I think will have him in better rhythm in most of these games, which will allow him to show more of his offensive upside, which we’re going to talk about in a bit. That’s really what separated him from that top tier. When AD is a reliable 28 point per game scorer, the guy that you saw in the bubble, that guy’s a top tier superstar. When he’s not, when he’s in the low 20s and he’s more inconsistent offensively, that’s when he’s more of that second tier star like we have in this particular list. And so I actually look at AD, the reason why I put him at 10 is I think we are going to get one of the better seasons from AD out of this phase of his prime. It’s a big part of why I ranked him where I ranked him. Now, let’s talk about AD as a basketball player. Rather than looking at his injury history and in the big picture, let’s zoom in on his basketball traits and what sets him apart from his peers. We have to start with defense for AD because that’s his calling card. There’s a similar range of outcomes for AD as a defender centering around his health because of his foot speed. Even the lesser footsp speeded version of AD has a really high floor as a perimeter defender. It’s not the same guy from New Orleans. Not the same guy from like 2020, but healthy AD, even bigger, bulky, healthy AD has real foot speed on the perimeter relative to his position, which brings a lot of upside. But as we as we talked about, there’s like these banged up versions of AD, like that second chunk of last season with the Lakers or what you saw with Dallas where it’s like that’s AD, but he’s clearly not moving very well even by his big bulky standards, right? But what’s crazy with AD, and it’s a big part of why I have him this high, is even lumbering AD, even big bulky AD that’s out of shape and is just coming back from an injury, even that guy has an incredibly high floor as a defensive player. And it starts with the shot blocking. He has a standing reach over 9 ft. He has good leaping ability, and he has outrageous natural defensive instincts. He can anticipate what offensive players are going to do around the rim. guessing release points where they’re going for layups. And as a result, even while constantly battling injury issues for the last five years and carrying all that extra weight, even with that, he still averaged 2.1 blocks per game over that 5year span that we were referencing earlier where he was consistently banged up. Now, as we know, the younger, faster AD averaged 2.5 blocks per game for the seven seasons previous. Obviously, he can get to a higher level there. Even when he’s healthy in rhythm, when he plays game after game after game after game, and he dropped some of the excess weight he’s carrying and he’s in good shape, he can go on runs. He had a stretch five games last year with the Lakers where he averaged 3.6 blocks per game over a fivegame stretch. He can still get there, but the point is his floor is an outrageously good shot blocker and rim protector. He does it without committing fouls. He does it without giving up too many unnecessary offensive rebounds by chasing stupid shots that he has no chance of blocking. He is a rock solid foundational rim protector in this league even when he’s banged up. He’s also an excellent defensive rebounder, a career 11 rebounds per game and 12.3 rebounds per game over his last three seasons. He led the entire league in rebounding in 2023. He was third in rebounding in 2024 and even the banged up version of Anthony Davis last year was seventh in overall rebounding. He has had occasional issues giving up certain types of offensive rebounds on like duckens to certain types of centers. So guys like Zubat, Sabonis, Joic, even Nerkish sometimes like we talked about. But even factoring in that down mark, there’s no way to look at Anthony Davis as anything other than a monster rebounder and one of the very best rebounders in the entire NBA. And that’s part of the appeal for a player like Anthony Davis on a list like this, his floor. No matter what Dallas is going to get, even if they even if he’s banged up and only plays 50 games, for 50 games, they’re going to get a rock solid defensive anchor. a guy who can protect the rim at an elite level and rebound at an elite level. And when you can do those two things, it just makes it so much easier for a basketball team to build around that and to function around that. We used to talk about this for 80s bad games, right? Like even the slower moving banged up version of AD, he’d have these like bad games where he’d have 12 points, 14 rebounds, and three blocks. And people would rightfully complain that like, yeah, that inconsistently inconsistency, especially on offense, is what would separate him from guys like Giannis. And that would be fair. If you’re comparing him to Giannis, you’re going to frequently run into things that are frustrating. I I’m not going to argue against that. But in those games, he was still doing so much dirty work. Like he’d have 124 and three and people would be complaining. And like to quote Pete Zas and again if you’re a Lakers fan, I think Pete and Darius have the best teamspecific Lakers podcast. You guys got to check it out. Pete taught me so much about what I know about the modern NBA and I just think he’s awesome. You guys have to go check out. It’s the Laker Film Room podcast. But Pete, you would always say like everyone’s yelling at AD when he’s trying to move the couch by himself and it’s like how about we help him move the couch and then we start complaining about whatever else he’s doing. And it’s the truth. Like AD had to carry such an insanely heavy load as a defensive player and as a rebounder for that Lakers team. You know, like we’re going to talk about him overall as a ceiling as a defensive player, but like a lot of times people will say like, “Oh, well AD doesn’t have these accolades. He doesn’t have the defensive player of the year, the racked up first team all defense awards and all this kind of stuff.” And you want to know why? It’s because people for years have had their brains broken by the idea of basketball being a team sport. It is a team sport and the Lakers were consistently fielding rosters utterly devoid of defensive talent where AD is carrying everything on that end of the floor. And we talk about it all the time. The the speed with which a dribble penetrator gets past his man if it’s a straight lines a straight line sprinting drive it breaks any defense. let alone a defense that’s anchored by an elite defensive player like Anthony Davis. The Lakers were a trash defense and they were still hitting mediocre, you know, in that, you know, 15 to 24 range of defensive ratings because Anthony Davis was anchoring everything on that end of the floor. Their second best defender was like an old LeBron who, as we all know, especially when he doesn’t believe a team can win the title, will take some time off on that end of the floor in the regular season. And I think AD is a grossly underappreciated defensive player overall. It’s a big part of why I have him so much higher on this list than many people will. Everything we just discussed is AD’s floor as a defensive player. Elite top tier rim protector, elite top tier rebounder. That’s the floor. The ceiling for AD as a defensive player is the best defensive player in the NBA. At least before Victor Webmanyama came around. Like I’m going to reference non WMBBY a few times here because he has come in and broken everything. But as you guys have noticed, we haven’t even gotten to WBY yet on this list. I’m a huge believer in what Victor Wimyama can do. But I believe before WMBBY that the healthy in shape Anthony Davis was the best defensive player in basketball. He was a frightening rim protector that would break offenses. Like even just last year, like I talked about, he had a fivegame stretch towards the beginning of the year when he was healthy and in shape where he averaged 3.6 blocks per game. That’s outrageous. But he’d also bring crazy scheme versatility, and this is what sets him apart. There are a lot of guys like Joel Embiid who are great rim protectors when they can sit back and protect the basket or sit in a deeper drop coverage, but as soon as you ask them to do anything else, it falls apart. like at you know I think game seven in that playoff series against the Celtics where he’s just getting pulled out to the perimeter and just cooked repeatedly over and over again by Jason Tatum with AD. You could ask him to be a deep drop coverage big and he’d crush at that. But you could also ask him to come up to the level and contest pullup shooters or as guys are coming downhill reaching in on the on the guard as he’s working downhill. He’s always been a high steals guy. He had 16 games last year with multiple steals, but again, he’s also an awesome switching big. Maybe not as good as a guy like Bameabio, but near that level. And in conjunction with his A++ rim protection, for a while there before We Wy came around, I thought healthy AD was the best defensive player in the world. I thought the 2023 series against Golden State was the classic example of how even this big bulky version of AD when he’s healthy is the best non-Wenbby defender in the world. He completely stifled Golden State’s offense to the point where every single decision that Steve Kerr made, every lineup decision, every floor geometry decision, everything Steve Kerr was doing was geared around getting Anthony Davis away from the action and away from the rim. And then in the pivotal moment of the series in game four when Steph was still causing so many problems for the Laker defense with what he was doing in pick and roll, Anthony Davis at the end of that game twice switched the screen, got on to Steph and got two key stops. He forced him into an extremely difficult one-legged fadeaway from the mid-range and a super deep three because Steph on the second look there was like, I’m not even going to try to go around this guy. I’m just gonna pull from out here and it was like a 30-footer that he ended up missing. That was the differentiator. Steve Kirk kept trying stuff and AD just literally had a defensive answer for everything they did. Even Steph on an island. And so that’s a big part of why I have AD at 10 this year. Even with his health variance, he’s going to be one of the top two or three defense and rebounding foundations in the entire NBA. in the high end is potentially the best defender in basketball other than Victor Wmanyama. That’s an extremely high floor for a guy before we even get to the offensive end. And then on the offensive end, while he can be frustrating and inconsistent as an onball player, he’s an excellent play finisher, which makes him on every single night a very useful offensive player. Again, 25 points per game last year on 59% true shooting. That’s nothing to roll your eyes at. He had three 40point games, 11 35point games, and 19 30point games. He was a super efficient roll man in ball screens on 190 reps as a Laker in ball screens. He got 1.23 points per possession, which is awesome. He shot 42% in pick and pop threes. This is an interesting idea. It’s something I wish the Lakers would have used more. It was better for their spacing as well. AD is not a good jump shooter, but for whatever reason, there’s something about the rhythm of pick and pop, and a lot of it could be with just how open he would get. But there was like a rhythm for him with pick and pop where he shot well out of it. He was 15 for 36 last year on pick and pop threes. He was also excellent on floaters, 52% last year. And then he’s a ridiculous vertical spacing threat. He’s got magnet hands. He catches everything with 9 foot standing reach and plenty of mobility even at his larger size to finish everything above the rim. So, he was flat out just an awesome pick and roll threat as the screener last year. He’s also a solid post player. He was a little down year-over-year last year, just 1.04 points per possession including passes, which is just above average. Nothing to write home about, but above average. The previous year though, he was very good. When he was healthier, he was 1.09 points per possession including passes out of the post, which was in the 71st percentile. Shoots over 50% on hook shots. That’s the thing with AD’s above 50% on both hook shots and floaters. Not Jokic territory. He’s going to be up over 60% on those. But AD among bigs in the NBA is as good a short range finisher as you’ll find outside of the Jokic types in the league. It was mainly a passing issue that kept him from really reaching his league uh his like ceiling as a post player in 2024 when he shot out of the post. Uh again, that was the year that he played super well and got 1.09 points per possession. In 2024, he had a score percentage when he’d shoot out of the post of 54%. Meaning, if you toss the ball to AD and he was able to get a shot up, he was going to score well over half the time. It was a super reliable play type. But over the years, even though he made some slight improvements as a passer, he never got good enough at it to become a guy that you could just lean on for high high volume out of the post the way you could with a guy like Embiid who was so good at scoring out of the post that even his playmaking issues didn’t matter as much. And a guy like Joic who’s obviously one of the best post players to ever touch the floor, right? There was just a tier AD was clearly a tier below because he could never quite figure out the passing element of it to to make his scoring ability worth it to be a super high volume postup player. He always just seemed to get spooked by double teams. The big thing I would always talk about is it would look like he was trying to get rid of the ball rather than trying to find the kill pass. like he’d catch the ball uh out of a double team in the post and he would dribble out and throw to a guy who’s being guarded by throwing an over-the-top pass just to like get rid of the ball and you throw the pass to a guy who’s 30 35 ft from the rim. Whereas like you watch the best post players in the league, they work aggressively into the double and try to pass through the defense to the weak side where there’s usually a wide open player or a wideopen cutter. They make the kill pass, the pass that make it makes it so that you cannot double him. That was the thing that AD never was quite able to figure out. And so because of that and because he was a little sketchy as a ball handler overall, it just it just never amounted to a legitimate offensive engine type of player the way Joel Embiid was able to get or the way that Nicole Joic was able to get. And that really is the differentiator for Anthony Davis between him as a second tier star and the top tier stars at the top in the league. The second piece of it was the jump shot. The jump shot just never came around to what it was in 2020. Like we talked about, he shot well on pick and pops, but overall last year he was just 0.9 points per shot on jump shots. He was okay from short range, 49% inside of 17 ft. And that’s fine, but that’s notably still under a point per shot. And he shot just 43% on long twos outside of 17 feet, which is only 0.86 points per shot. And he was below 30% from three. So even from three, he was below a point per shot. So again, like him not developing as either a great jump shooter or an elite ball handler playmaker because like Giannis never became an elite jump shooter, but Giannis has become an elite ball handler playmaker as a monster front court defensive weapon. And that is what allowed Giannis to become like a perennial MVP candidate in the way that Anthony Davis has not been able to figure out. If he could have become an elite jump shooter, you know, Allah Dirk Nitzky, that becomes a thing that can carry him up. He didn’t he wouldn’t even need to be as good as Dirk. Just if he became an elite jump shooter relative to most play finishers, just like a knockdown pick and pop big or something like that, he could have been a guy that could have entered into that top tier because of how gifted he was defensively. If he could have just figured out how to become a top not a top tier, but a very good on the ball player as a ball handler, playmaker, he could have entered into that tier. But he ended up being neither. And again, you can factor in injuries into that equation. I think it’s worth mentioning like AD has never really been able to work on his game as much as some of his peers because he’s been banged up. But that has been what’s kept him from entering into that superstar tier outside of the 2020 season. In that 2020 season when he shot like Kevin Freaking Durant in the bubble, I had him as the fourth best player in the world. And I think that was like the absolute peak. It was a skinnier version of AD that was a better defensive player and just a ridiculous shot maker out of the high post in ISO situations. and it just and he shot really well from three, too. Famously hit a game-winning three against the uh Denver Nuggets in that Western Conference Final Series. So, he was just another level of a jump shooter. That’s kind of an example of what I was talking about, like jump shooting AD plus elite defense, top tier superstar. If he could have figured out the playmaking piece because he has shotmaking out of the post, he could have got there. But he just never was able to figure those pieces out. But still, when you look at the big picture, you can basically bank on AD to give you at least 25 and 12 next year, and you can bank on him being an excellent defensive rebounder and rim protector. That’s the floor. What a strong foundation for the rest of your team to build on. And he’s still a good postup threat and a top tier role man weapon that you can build around on offense. On any given night, he can explode for 40 points. And that’s the low end. And I think there’s a range of potential outcomes here where he hits higher because of his motivation level. And I think we’re going to get there. So for me, I had Anthony Davis at number 10 this year. Now, before we move on to the Chris Paul Kyrie debate, I did want to give a bonus AD topic regarding him playing the power forward for the Dallas Mavericks. He said, I saw another quote just the other day of him talking about how he views himself as a power forward more than a center. And again, like I want to start like this. I don’t want to say that AD can’t play power forward. I actually think in the modern NBA having two big looks is a important you know punch that you can throw in certain situations. So for instance like the Thunder being able to lean heavily into Hartinstein and Chet in the Denver series was a huge part of how they were able to make things very difficult for Nicole Joic. So, I think you should have that look, but then as you can see, like then when the Thunder got into later playoff rounds, they went away from the two too big look. Like they didn’t use it as much against the Pacers because the speed would have been an issue, right? And so, like the point is is like you want to have that as a punch, but it can’t be your like foundational thing that you try to do. And this is where I get a little concerned about the overall team construct of the Dallas Mavericks, especially with all the centers that they have on staff right now. The problem is AD is fast. Even big bulky AD is fast for a center, but he’s not fast compared to power forwards. Old LeBron is a much better athlete than Anthony Davis in terms of foot speed and quickness and changing ends of the floor. Aaron Gordon in the Western Conference, like even Kevin Durant for the Houston Rockets moves better than Anthony Davis does, right? So like at the five his speed is an asset. At the four, his speed is a liability. Similarly, his offensive skill, his short-range shotmaking, his ball handling ability. At the five, it’s an asset. At the four, it’s a liability. And one of the things that happens is if you get him on the floor at the four, you start to dip below these kind of like mandatory minimums in certain areas of skill set. You put AD at the four next to a Derek Lively or a Daniel Gaffford, all of a sudden your team doesn’t really have much ball handling on the floor. You put Anthony Davis at the four by a Derek Lively, all of a sudden your team doesn’t have much jump shooting on the floor. All of a sudden, even just overall foot speed, like we didn’t talk about this earlier, but one of the few weaknesses Anthony Davis has on the defensive end is he is not a good transition big. He falls on the ground a lot. He complains at the refs a lot. And he doesn’t run back on defense. I’ve seen bigs beat Anthony Davis just literally by running him up and down the floor. Like even at the center position, he can sometimes struggle as a changing ends type of floor runner. So like at the four it can become a serious problem. So again, I don’t hate the idea of the Mavs having two big looks, and you could even talk me into starting games that way, but to me, at least half and all of your at least half of your total minutes and all of the clutch time big picture moments, aside from maybe against Denver, you’re going to need Anthony Davis at center because same with Cooper Flag. Cooper Flag has a ball handling, skill, speed advantage against fours, but he’s gonna run into some issues against threes right away in the NBA. He’ll improve, but like Cooper Flag can handle the ball, but how much is this handling going to be a factor if there’s not a lot of surrounding ball handling? Like like what if they end up starting Klay Thompson? We’ll see what ends up happening. But like Klay Thompson’s not a guy who dribbles the ball a lot. You could you could run into some issues in terms of your aggregate ball handling on the floor with Anthony Davis at the four. It’s just something to keep an eye on as we watch the Mavs next year. All right, before we get out of here today, I want to spend a few minutes talking about Chris Paul versus Kyrie Irving. So, this is an interesting debate because Kyrie Irving kind of has a strangle hold on basketball culture and I don’t think that’s an accident. I think he’s one of the top three or four most aesthetically appealing basketball players I’ve ever watched. He’s just so much fun to watch when he’s chaining together dribble combinations and he’s showing outrageous footwork and some of the wildest finishes I’ve ever seen. Yeah, every once in a while you’ll see the clips from like game five or game seven, game seven in particular of the uh uh of the NBA finals in 2016. And he had this play where he got he either got a defensive rebound or got an outlet pass. And he threw this like straight up wicked push ahead dribble that had this crazy like voodoo backspin on it cuz it came out of his hands at like this sharp angle forward, hit the ground and then just bounced straight back up so that he could catch it on the run. and he like got into a euro or a high gather and went like left hand way out wide while getting fouled like super high off the glass and it just like perfectly kissed off the glass and went into the basket and you’re just like oh my god that was one of the craziest most beautiful basketball plays I’ve ever seen like he has that certain aesthetic appeal that just has the basketball culture in a strangle hold. He also has one of the most iconic shots in NBA history on his resume with the step back three over Steph Curry to win the 2016 Finals. He’s a champion, which Chris Paul is not. Those are the things that I think drive a lot of the momentum behind Kyrie Irving as a player who could be considered as better than Chris Paul. But I think Chris Paul at his peak was just a better basketball player than Kyrie Irving. Seen a lot of talk about defense. I think Kyrie Irving is actually a little bit underrated as a defender uh famously in those stretches. If you remember, Kyrie defended well, chasing around screens and staying attached to shooters. And he was never a guy that would be super focused over the course of regular seasons, but I never felt like Kyrie was a substantial weak point on the defensive end of the floor when I was rooting for him during those years with the Cavaliers. So, like I Chris Paul is a more uh decorated defender and certainly in his prime was a more committed regular season defender, but to me I’m not looking at the defensive end as much of a differentiator between those two. To me, the difference is simply the archetype. Kyrie Irving is a scorer and one of the very best to do it, but Chris Paul is a legitimate offensive engine. I think you see this sort of issue when you look at years like when Kyrie Irving was trying to lead those Boston Celtics teams, which in retrospect, like that was why he left Cleveland, if you guys remember, he kind of wanted an opportunity to lead his own team. And when he got there, you find out pretty quickly that I talk about this idea all the time with respect to scores versus offensive engines. The aim of the game is not to generate 30 points on 60% true shooting for yourself. you you got to generate you’re taking 80 90 shots in a game as a team and you’re going to be on the floor for call it 80% of that. So, you’re you’re going to need to generate for your team, you know, 60 70 shots. Maybe not all in points and assists, but in advantage creation, you’re going to have your 25 to 30 that you pour in as an onball scorer for a guy like Chris Paul, more like in that, you know, 18 to 24 kind of range, although Chris Paul had big score games. But then you’re going to have your assists, like your 10 to 12 times a game, or you spoonfed a guy a wide open three or a cut, which is going to lead to a bucket. But for the offensive engine types, it’s also the 20 to 30 to 40 times a game where you got into an action early in a set and you made a read that got a guy a closeout or shifted the defense side to side or did something to generate an advantage that your team then capitalized on with two or three additional sequences that led to an open shot. That’s why I’m so I gravitate so much towards offensive engines. They simply generate so much more offense for their team relative to what things look like in the box score. Like a guy like Tyresese Hallebertton, he’s going to average, you know, 16, 17 points per game and, you know, 11, 12 assists, whatever it is that he puts up. And it’s not going to look like it manifests some great offensive output, but he generates so many advantages that the Pacers play off for extended stretches of each possession. and he gets into it early in the possession that like for whatever reason when he’s off the floor the Pacers suddenly don’t score at nearly as effective a level. That is the value of it being an offensive engine. With a guy like Kyrie Irving as a scorer, there’s a certain level of variance. Yeah, he made all those damn pullup jump shots against the Golden State Warriors and it was the reason that they were able to push over the top and win the title when he hit the shot against Steph Curry. But he also looked great for three rounds with the Dallas Mavericks in 2024. And then what happened against Boston? Suddenly he couldn’t make those pull-up jump shots. They weren’t going in. And by the way, that that’s he was going against really good defenders who made it tougher. But we’ve seen Kyrie Irving hit really tough shots. There’s just a lot of variance. Specifically with tough shot making, there’s a heavy make miss factor. And sometimes they don’t go in. And then when they don’t go in, what’s your offensive value that you’re bringing to the table? And Kyrie Irving was a good P is a good passer. But he is not the type of offensive engine that a guy like Chris Paul was. So you get into it, you get a little more complicated. It’s like, okay, well, Chris Paul’s not good enough to win the title as your number one option. I’m not I actually do believe that if Chris Paul was on better teams when he was in his prime, he would have had a really good chance. Like now like the 2022 with the Suns, he was so old his body was breaking down at the end of that NBA Final Series. But like if you go back to the mid 2010s, if he was on one of the better rosters in the NBA, I I absolutely think Chris Paul was good enough to win the title. But it didn’t happen for whatever reason. Okay, Kyrie Irving did get one. Playing alongside the greatest basketball player ever, it’s it’s not the same. And as we go to the number two piece, yeah, I do think Kyrie Irving is flat out an awesome option to have as your second best player when you’re alongside a superstar player that can handle a lot of that like upside in terms of um you know managing the load of offensive shot creation. But like just look at it as the reverse for a Chris Paul. So he’s a a shot creator. So you wouldn’t want to pair him with another shot creator. I do think there were some diminishing returns when you put a guy like Chris Paul with a James Harden or if you were to put him with a Luca Donic or even a LeBron James because they kind of do a lot of the same things. We’ve talked a lot about that with the idea of the Lakers potentially trying to pair Luca with Joic. I I just don’t think that that’s nearly as good a team as it looks like on paper because those skill sets overlap too much. So, for a guy like Chris Paul, if Kyrie Irving got to play with a LeBron James at the peak of his powers and and get a title there, I do believe that if in 2016 you swapped Russell Westbrook for Chris Paul, I think that Thunder team is absolutely a legitimate championship team. Now, would they have beat LeBron? Who knows? Would would they have beat Steph? Who knows? But like I think if you paired CP3 with Kevin Durant for six years in the heart of their primes, I think they get a title because you would be pairing Chris Paul’s offensive engine nature with the tip of the spear scoring that Kevin Durant provides. So yeah, Chris Paul doesn’t have a title the way that Kyrie Irving does and he doesn’t have the cultural resonance that a guy like Kyrie Irving does. And yeah, he’s got a couple of tough black marks on his resume in terms of rough playoff moments, but so does Kyrie. And like ultimately, when I look at it, I just think Chris Paul is a better basketball player than Kyrie Irving because they’re more even as defenders than people think. But Chris Paul is much better at generating offense for his entire team than Kyrie Irving is. And that is an example of why I gravitate towards those offensive engine types more than the scoring types. All right, guys. That’s all I have for today. As always, I sincerely appreciate you guys for supporting us and supporting the show. We will be back with number nine on Wednesday, as well as another one of these kind of debaty topics at the tail end. I will see you guys then.

Jason breaks down why he has Dallas Mavericks big man Anthony Davis, formerly of the Los Angeles Lakers, ranked as the 10th best player in the NBA heading into next season. He discusses his strengths as a defender and overall weaknesses, including his injury history, and why he’s expecting such a big, full season after the Luka Doncic trade. Then he gives his take on the viral debate from last week: Chris Paul vs. Kyrie Irving.

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