Who will be the NBA’s best players in the 2022–23 season? Sports Illustrated’s annual Top 100 list is back, aiming to answer that question.
This year, the rankings were determined by NBA writers Chris Herring, Rohan Nadkarni and Jeremy Woo through a combination of data and subjective evaluation. The goal remains to evaluate players in a vacuum as much as possible, without overvaluing team context in taking stock of their quality.
To be clear, these rankings are specifically for the upcoming season and do not take into account players’ long-term prospects or career arcs beyond 2022–23. As has been the tradition here, rookies were not considered. So it’s best to consider these rankings as short-term value projections. This is not a representation of a player’s trade value or contract value, and it does not account for the impact of his salary relative to his production. The possibility of growth or decline is a factor, tied to players’ age and career stage. The list attempts to account for the entirety of a player’s impact: offense, defense, structural or otherwise, and tends to favor those with the most malleable skill sets.
