As a follow up to yesterday’s awards ballot, here are my 15 choices for All-NBA, including a mildly detailed explanation for why certain players ended up where they did, and why a few deserving names didn’t make it at all.
First Team
Guard: Luka Dončić
Guard: Stephen Curry
Forward: Giannis Antetokounmpo
Forward: Jayson Tatum
Center: Nikola Jokić
First things first: Nikola Jokić and Joel Embiid are centers. Basketball-Reference has Jokić playing 100% of his minutes at the five in three of the last four seasons, while Cleaning the Glass has him at 100% this year. Meanwhile, Basketball-Reference has logged every single minute of Embiid’s career as a center. So, yeah. They’re centers.
Now that that’s out of the way: Jokić is better. He has the highest PER in NBA history, ranks first in Real Plus-Minus, 538’s RAPTOR, Bball Index’s LEBRON, Estimated Plus-Minus, and pretty much every other catch-all metric that currently exists.
His efficiency was staggering all over the court, including in the post, where he ranked No. 1 in points per possession and shot 62.8% from the field, which also placed him above all players who logged at least 100 chances, per Synergy Sports. If you have to ask about his passing—which is easily his most impressive quality—take 10 minutes on YouTube watching a highlight reel and let it be the best 10 minutes of your entire day.
Only five players have more assists and only Trae Young, Luka Dončić and Chris Paul have a higher assist rate. Read those three names again and realize Jokić is more than the best passing big man of all time. He’s just one of the sport’s most ingenious passers, period.
Giannis was second on my MVP ballot and is also Giannis, meaning so long as he’s healthy for the next five or six years it’s almost impossible for one of the first-team forward positions not to have his name beside it. He was one of this season’s top defenders, ate at the rim, improved his free-throw shooting and started nailing pull-up jump shots.
Tatum’s season was off to a slow start and before January 1 it didn’t look like he’d earn any awards, let alone make first-team All-NBA. But the way he blitzed the league for several straight months, as the best player on the best team, can’t be ignored. Tatum’s vision/selflessness went to a level most playmaking superstars need it to, and his defense was impeccable in a system that forced him to guard all five positions. He was elite on the ball and as a helper, and his overall on/off numbers were that of a worthy MVP candidate.
In a more heliocentric offensive system, Luka Dončić led the NBA in usage and time of possession while assisting more threes than everyone except Giannis. His volume and efficiency in isolation made it safe to call him the most dangerous one-on-one weapon in the entire league. In 20 games after the All-Star break, Dončić averaged 30.5 points, 9.1 rebounds and 8.2 assists per game.
Putting Curry on the first team shouldn’t require a lengthy explanation and can best be summed up by everything I wrote about him as an MVP candidate (he finished fifth on my ballot). It’s tempting to let recency bias damage his case but when compared to the field, even a down-shooting season—Curry made 38% of the 11.7 threes jacked per game—was still a stick of dynamite.
Second Team
Guard: Trae Young
Guard: Ja Morant
Forward: Kevin Durant
Forward: DeMar DeRozan
Center: Joel Embiid
We won’t be spending a ton of time discussing Embiid, who’s second or third overall in virtually every advanced metric, with elite rim protection and singular physicality unseen since Shaquille O’Neal’s prime. Next to James Harden, Embiid’s usage rate (36.4%) and true shooting (64.3%) remained incredibly high and all year long the Sixers were a force to reckon with despite the unavailability of their second-best player for the season’s opening five months.
The rest of this team’s slots were a bit trickier to figure out, mostly thanks to the number of guards who cobbled together first-team-caliber resumes. None, though, overwhelmed defenses quite like Young, who finished the season with more points and assists than anyone else. (He’s 23 years old. That’s…kind of a big deal.) Young also joined Oscar Robertson, Harden, Tiny Archibald, LeBron James and Russell Westbrook as members of the 2,100-point, 700-assist club.
Remember when there was all that talk about how the NBA’s new foul rules would weaken one of his great strengths. Well, some of that was true. His free-throw rate dropped and instead of nine attempts per game he was down to 7.3. But Young remained a master craftsman, drawing 118 non-shooting fouls that sent him to the free-throw line. That number led the league. In second was Jokić at…66.
Also: he shot the ball better. A lot better. Young’s career-best true shooting percentage (60.2) was about the same as Steph Curry—notably thanks to his effective field goal percentage off the dribble finishing a smidge better—and higher than Booker, Mitchell, Paul and Morant. Young spent the offseason working on his mid-range shot (in an attempt to emulate Paul) and quietly became a long two sniper.
His defense was feeble on a team that finished 26th in defensive rating and allowed 6.6 fewer points per 100 possessions without him on the court. Atlanta also entered the season thinking it could finish with one of the top four records in the conference and will instead compete in the play-in. That’s all disappointing. But keep in mind: Young is also the only All-Star on his team. The offensive responsibility was immense against opponents that threw the kitchen sink at him every night.
DeRozan was the offseason’s most important free agent signing (in more ways than one) and almost single handedly turned one of the NBA’s most hapless franchises around by refusing to let them lose games they once did. His true shooting in the clutch was an ungodly 67%, peppered by game-winners and cinematic go-ahead buckets in arenas filled with thousands of people who knew the play call before it unfolded. Nobody scored more points in the fourth quarter.
At 32 years old, DeRozan averaged a career-high 27.9 points per game and led all players in two-point baskets (making 52% of them, which was his second-highest mark). Only Young scored more total points and only Embiid and Antetokounmpo took and made more free throws. Bucking a career-long criticism, Chicago was not better with DeRozan on the bench.
It took a lot to keep Morant off the first team. His season was just so memorable, filled with unforgettable feats of athletic genius and fearless drives to the rim that yielded more points in the paint than pretty much any guard who’s ever played. His three-point shot ticked up a bit to a respectable 34.4% and his usage jumped a whopping 6.6 points. Unfortunately, as it pertains to cracking first-team All-NBA, in an 82-game season Ja appearing in only 57 of them hurt.
Just like Morant, Durant would’ve made the first team had he not injured his knee. He was his amazing self all season, through unprecedented obstacles (Kyrie Irving’s self-imposed exile because he didn’t want to get vaccinated against a disease that’s killed millions of people over the past two years), spacing issues and a blockbuster trade that saw one former MVP go out the door for an injured All-Star who didn’t play. In the end, he posted his second-highest scoring average (30.1 points per game) and a career-best 6.2 assists while barely missing a 50/40/90 campaign. (A true slacker, Durant only made 39.1% of his threes.)
It was as true this year as any before: there are only three things in life that are guaranteed: Death, taxes and KD curling off a pindown to knock down a jump shot.
Third Team
Tommy Gilligan/USA TODAY Sports
Guard: Devin Booker
Guard: Chris Paul
Forward: Pascal Siakam
Forward: LeBron James
Center: Karl-Anthony Towns
LeBron’s season was, at the same time, a miracle and somewhat of a black eye. Dig into the numbers and there are still signs of a king. He came in seventh in Estimated Wins and had a top-20 true shooting percentage, while spending nearly half his minutes at center. LeBron nearly won the scoring title and—for much of a season where he found himself surrounded by washed up journeymen, fading stars and stalled development projects—shot 62% inside the arc (the second-highest two-point field goal percentage of his career).
In crunchtime, LeBron made 34 shots that would tie or take the lead in the final two minutes of a game that was either in the fourth quarter or overtime, which led all players by a decent margin despite him missing 26 games.
Now, for a 37-year-old to do all of that, we have to stop and ask if LeBron is actually a real person. But on the other hand, like, the Lakers did. not. even. make. the. play-in! He finished 510th out of 604 players in total plus/minus and barely cleared a 2,000-minute threshold that he’s only ducked twice in his career (the shortened 2020-21 season being one time). If someone like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander or De’Aaron Fox posted similar numbers they would barely crack an All-NBA debate. Losing teams are irrelevant for a reason. LeBron, of course, is not Fox or SGA, so he gets a spot.
Paired with him at forward is a version of Pascal Siakam who’s looked like Giannis, sans the rhinoceros strength, for several months now. While leading the league in minutes per game, Siakam has quietly become one of the NBA’s most underrated players. His bag is brilliantly goofy, packed with semi-spin moves, step throughs, baby hook shots, step backs and runners. They’re effective and idiosyncratic, as the ball plops through the rim without Siakam’s shoulders square or his eyes looking at the hoop.
It’s amusing whenever a big man jumps out on a switch and knows they can’t give Siakam too much space so they press up around the elbows, hoping Siakam’s runway to the rim isn’t long enough to beat them to the rim. Siakam slithers by them every time. On the other end, clean looks don’t happen whenever Siakam is nearby. Watch what he does in the paint to Clint Capela before running Bogdan Bogdanovic off the three-point line.
It’s unusual for a No. 1 seed not to have any of their players represented on an All-NBA team, but Jimmy Butler played about 650 fewer minutes than Siakam.
Another debate worth having is Karl-Anthony Towns vs. Rudy Gobert, though if vibes were somehow quantifiable it’d be a very quick one. It’s reductive to frame it this way: But Towns made my third-team because he’s a better player.
Gobert had a typical Gobert season, which is to say he was a strong Defensive Player of the Year candidate who made seven out of every 10 shots he took, rebounded everything in sight and executed his important (albeit limited) role within the NBA’s best offense. But the Jazz have also been a complete mess on and off the court, losing more games than they won in 2022. And, in the context of comparing his season to Karl’s, Gobert’s inability to create any offense for himself is partially to blame.
Meanwhile, despite hemorrhaging points at the rim with Towns in part because he spent so much time guarding pick-and-rolls high on the floor, the Wolves finished the season with an average half-court defense. He wasn’t an elite paint protector or particularly successful switching ball screens, but Towns wasn’t a hindrance to his team, either.
Offensively, only Jokić and Embiid created more headaches at the center position. Towns was his low-post menace self, while also attacking closeouts, dragging bigs out of the paint and, as he’s wont to do, making a ton of threes. There were 82 players who launched at least 350 of them this season. Only five were more accurate than Towns, who drilled 41% as the most important offensive player on a team that had the fourth-best net rating since New Year’s Day.
Without Anthony Edwards, KAT’s usage (31.6) and true shooting percentage (66.1) were almost identical to Jokić’s season averages. And Jokić’s effectiveness was historic, so, yeah, Towns had a pretty good year.
In the backcourt, Paul and Booker were a pair of poison-tipped arrows on a team that won 64 games and sat in first place from Jan. 11 to Sunday. Either could easily have made the first or second team, but, through no fault of their own, I had a difficult time removing the context of their own partnership from the equation in a way that somewhat benefited those who made it over them. The differences were so marginal.
Paul was the assist leader and averaged 15.8 per 100 possessions (the second highest of his career and 2.2 more than the runner up). He shot only 31.7% from behind the arc but more than made up for it in myriad ways, be it directing the most efficient crunch-time offense in recent history or knocking down an incomprehensible 57.4% of all jumpers launched between 8-16 feet. Booker will see his name on a bunch of MVP ballots and as the season’s eighth-leading scorer the Suns steamrolled opponents with him on the court. When Paul went down with his hand injury, Booker averaged 28.2 points, 7.0 assists and 1.2 steals on near 50/40/90 splits.
Apologies to Donovan Mitchell, who fine-tuned his pick-and-roll playmaking and became a more reliable finisher around the basket.
