Why we’re ranking the 101 best NBA players in 2021

Hello, friends. Over the next five days, we’ll be unveiling a project we’ve been working on all summer. We will predict the 101 best players in the NBA...in 2021.

Not the 101 best players of all time. Not the 101 best players today, in the year 2017.

Over the next five days, we’ll roll out our #101of2021 list in 10 different batches of 10 players, starting with Nos. 101-91. We’ll post two of those batches of 10 every day until we get to the end of the list on Friday. By then, we’ll have a living document of how we think the future will play out.

We look forward to looking back at how wrong we were about many different players, for better or worse. And we will be wrong, which is OK. If we really could tell the future, we wouldn’t be writing about basketball for a living. Hell, we wouldn’t be doing anything for a living.

You’ve probably seen plenty of player ranking lists, but we hope you’ll enjoy our spin on this recurring exercise. We think it’s more fun to rank things when we can’t have all the answers. No matter how much we pore over the NBA.com stats page, no matter how bloodshot our eyes are from watching Synergy, no matter how many basketball experts we consult, we cannot know the future.

Rather than see this as a shortcoming, we’re embracing our own lack of foresight in the hopes of starting a discussion folks will actually enjoy instead of the usual anger that player ranking lists tend to inspire.

You probably have a bunch of questions about this project. Let me provide some answers.

The pithy answer: because it’s fun and interesting.

The longer answer: because we think this hits at the core of why we’re fascinated by player rankings.

There is no one right way to rank basketball players. Not for today, not for tomorrow, and not for the past. We cannot find the Holy Grail for evaluating NBA players, as much as we seek it.

In a perfect world, rankings open us up to larger discussions about how to value certain attributes and what elements of the game are actually most important to success. They should create a dialogue in which everyone is exposed to different perspectives and we all become smarter for it. The whole point is to learn, not to proclaim that we know the answers.

That’s why we’ve added the additional variable of projecting four years into the future. Nobody has perfect clairvoyance — not players, not coaches or GMs, not experts, not fans, and definitely not writers like ourselves. We all must make educated guesses using the limited information we have and our own ideas for how the game will trend.

In the process, we’ll be right about some things and wrong about many others. Sometimes, we’ll be wrong because we didn’t heed the right lessons. That can be an opportunity to learn something new, which is productive.

Sometimes, we’ll be wrong out of ignorance. Maybe we’ll miss something with a certain player that others who know him better grasp. If that’s the case, it can be another opportunity to learn.

And sometimes, we’ll be wrong because shit happens. That will be a chance to celebrate the wonder of the unexpected.

We don’t think anyone should be above considering those three ways in which their prognoses fail, especially not those making the choices. Hopefully, this format levels the playing field and leads to more civil reactions.

Let’s start with how we didn’t do this: by coming up with some formula or aggregate ranking. Our goal isn’t to discover one truth. It’s to engage different perspectives and talk them out with each other, much like friends chopping it up. We should disagree, banter back and forth, and discuss areas of emphasis we may not have thought of ourselves.

How did we do that? By asking 10 different SBNation.com contributors to participate in a Top 101 of 2021 draft. One person picked who they believed the best player in 2021 will be (stay tuned), someone followed with No. 2, and so on. We then did this all the way to 101.

When done, each person explained the rationale for the pick, and some combination of the other nine reacted to that explanation. We also touched base with members of our SB Nation team communities to get their thoughts on our decisions, since they follow those players most.

So this shouldn’t be seen as the definitive SB Nation Top 101 of 2021, necessarily. It’s more like 10 friends engaging in a fantasy draft without actually drafting specific teams.

In order of pick:

(An 11th person, John Ketchum, subbed in for Zito by the end. John is our night deputy editor.)

Yup! Four years ago, in fact. And six years ago as well! We were so, so wrong about a lot of things.

It’s fun to look back and see which players we thought would develop and which came out of nowhere to become terrific NBA players. It was an exercise that humbled us.

So naturally, we’re doing it again.

Yes, a number of players not currently in the NBA will be on the list. We haven’t exactly showcased the ability to predicting The Next Best Things in the past, but we’re going back to the well anyway.

(No LaMelo Ball, though. Spoiler alert).

Because four years is long enough for the unexpected to happen, but short enough that we’re mostly familiar with the players who’ll matter.

Four years is the span of a rookie-scale contract and the longest for which a team can sign someone else’s free agent. It’s the gap between the start of a career and the beginning of one’s prime, between prime and post-prime, and (usually) between post-prime and retirement. It’s just enough time for the guard to change while maintaining some elements of the previous league order.

Think of it this way.

Four years ago, the Warriors hadn’t even put together a 50-win season. The idea of them becoming an unstoppable juggernaut was ridiculous.

At the same time, LeBron James was the center of the basketball world four years ago after winning his second championship. Four years later, LeBron arguably still is the center of the basketball world, even if he’s changed zip codes.

Not especially seriously in terms of accuracy. Like we mentioned before, the future is too hard to predict for us to be fortune tellers. If all 10 of us came up with our own #101of2021 lists, they’d all look very different.

But we hope that you take the discussions seriously as a means for seeing what we tend to value, which players are up or down, and who is currently on an upward or downward trajectory. When we look back on this in four years, we hope this can be a reasonable proxy for public opinion at the time.

The comments section on each of the individual posts is your friend. We appreciate your feedback and want to hear it.

We’d also love to hear from you on social media, whether it’s tweeting at us and/or using the #101of2021 hashtag.

You can also gripe about any of us in the comments section of your favorite team’s SB Nation community.

Get as mad as you want, then prove us wrong. We’d love nothing better than to know we underestimated you.

Again: If we all knew the future, life wouldn’t be very much fun.

In addition to the actual list, we’ll be publishing several supplementary pieces. Among those:

Stay tuned for all of those over the course of the week.

We hope so, and we hope you all are ruthless mocking it.

Just make sure you also admit that there was a lot you didn’t anticipate about the future four years ago. The element of surprise is exactly why we love this game. Let’s embrace it.

INTRO | FULL LIST | TOP 100 OF 2017 | HOW WE DID IN 2013 | SNUBS | 101-91 | 90-81 | 80-71 | 70-61 | 60-51 | 50-41 | 40-31 | 30-21 | 20-11 | 10-1 | THE CASES FOR NO. 1