Ranking the NBA's Most Underrated Players of the Last 5 Years
Stars define the NBA, but their brilliance doesn't have to distract us from other players who deserve shine of their own.
Those who make their living on defense or as passers, those who find ways to drive winning without piling up points or awards—they're the overlooked and unappreciated contributors who need more recognition.
Here, we're going to single out players who've performed far better than you might remember over the last five seasons.
We've got an old-school center, a textbook two-way forward, an ace floor general and the best point guard nobody ever talks about. None of them has star status, but every player on our top-five list deserves to be celebrated.
5. Royce O'Neale, Phoenix Suns
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Availability is a skill, and only two players can claim to have more of it than Royce O'Neale over the last five years. He suited up for 374 games in that span, a figure bested by Buddy Hield (388) and undisputed NBA iron man Mikal Bridges (392).
O'Neale canned 38.2 percent of his threes in that sample, frequently defended the opponent's best player and was a full-time starter across three dominant years for a Utah Jazz team that finished ninth, first and third in point differential from 2019-20 to 2021-22.
A true three-and-D wing who began showcasing that skill set at a time when every team in the league was obsessed with it, O'Neale routinely put up low usage, high-efficiency scoring seasons augmented by an assist rate that graded out above the 90th percentile for his position in each of the five years we're considering.
O'Neale has never averaged double-digit points in a season, but he does everything else well and fits into any lineup. That's still true today, as evidenced by the Phoenix Suns handing him a four-year, $42 million contract to fill their fifth-starter role. But it was particularly undeniable during O'Neale's prime, which lined up almost perfectly with the five years under consideration here.
4. Mike Conley, Minnesota Timberwolves
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It's true that Mike Conley finally shed the label of "best player never to make an All-Star game" in 2021, but let's not pretend that honor removed him from the list of the league's most underrated players.
First of all, he only made it as an injury replacement for Devin Booker. And second, Conley still gets too little credit for bringing professionalism, organized offensive leadership and team success wherever he goes.
If that kind of wishy-washy, unquantifiable praise doesn't persuade you, maybe this will: Conley has produced a higher Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) figure across the last five seasons than De'Aaron Fox, Jaylen Brown, Jamal Murray, Russell Westbrook, Draymond Green, Ja Morant, Zion Williamson, Bradley Beal, Khris Middleton and Brandon Ingram—just to keep the list confined to an even number of 10.
Plenty of other (bigger) names also sit beneath Conley in that catch-all metric.
Though he's not the disruptive defensive force he was in his mid-20s with the Memphis Grizzlies, Conley has found other ways to make elite contributions as he's aged. He drilled 44.2 percent of his threes last season, and his on-off splits are littered with enormously positive differentials over the last five years, like when he juiced the 2020-21 Jazz's net rating by 11.2 points per 100 possessions, or when he was a plus-8.2 for the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2022-23.
Where Conley goes, success follows.
3. Ivica Zubac, LA Clippers
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A lumbering, paint-bound center, Ivica Zubac entered the league at the absolute worst time.
As a 19-year-old rookie in 2016-17, the plodding 7-footer found himself surrounded by positionless wings and combo forwards masquerading as bigs. Everyone was scrambling to keep up with the Golden State Warriors' death lineup and the Houston Rockets' five-out spacing—to the point that old-school centers like Zubac seemed on the verge of extinction.
The Los Angeles Lakers traded him for what amounted to 17 games of Mike Muscala at the 2019 deadline.
Cast off by the Lakers, Zubac rounded into form as a full-time starter for the LA Clippers in 2019-20, right at the beginning of our last-five-years window.
He's quietly been one of the NBA's best centers ever since.
A force at the rim who hasn't shot below 61.3 percent from the field in any of the last five seasons, Zubac has deft touch on short flips and push shots. He hit those difficult 3-to-10 footers at a 59.9 percent clip last season.
Conversely, opponents have found it nearly impossible to score efficiently when Zubac is near the bucket on defense. Only three players who defended as many shots inside six feet as Zubac last year—Walker Kessler, Kristaps Porzingis and Rudy Gobert—held opponents to a lower hit rate. For most of the last half-decade, he's been right in that top-five range among high-volume accuracy-suppressors.
It almost feels like a credit to Zubac that he's never so much as dabbled with the idea of adding a three-point shot. Skill development is important, as is keeping up with modern trends, but maybe we should celebrate the big man for knowing who he is and leaning into his strengths.
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2. Kyle Anderson, Golden State Warriors
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Over the last five years, Kyle Anderson has played a little over 8,000 minutes while posting a block rate of 2.6 percent and a steal rate of 2.1 percent.
Do you know which other NBA players can also make that claim?
Try zero.
Even if we adjust the sliders down to filter for players with block and steal rates above 2.0 percent in at least 8,000 minutes, we only get three names beside Anderson's: Draymond Green, OG Anunoby and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. Just to get it on the record, that's a list composed of arguably the most versatile defender of all time, the guy who probably holds that mantle today and a second-place finisher in last year's MVP voting.
Absolutely no one would put Anderson, whose slow-paced game and unassuming style make him easy to overlook and underrate, in a category with those other three players. But we're talking about well-documented defensive disruption over an enormous sample of minutes.
In fact, get this: Anderson's undervalued work has produced more win shares in the last five seasons than Green or Anunoby. Ditto for VORP.
It's not just Anderson's defense that made him so valuable over the last half-decade. Though defenses don't honor his stilted, halting three-point shot, the 6'9" forward is a flat-out elite passer for his position. The ball never sticks when Slo-Mo gets his hands on it, and it always seems to find its way to an open scorer. Anderson's worst ranking in assist-to-usage rate over the last five years was a 93rd percentile finish in 2020-21.
1. Fred VanVleet, Houston Rockets
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It's telling that Fred VanVleet lands here, despite his contributions to a Toronto Raptors championship run falling outside the period we're considering.
It's fine. He doesn't need that to bolster his case.
Start with VanVleet posting the league's 21st-ranked VORP total since 2019-20, which rates ahead of Devin Booker, Pascal Siakam, Jrue Holiday, Paul George, DeMar DeRozan and Kyrie Irving—among many other more decorated stars. Then thin-slice the data to uncover FVV's other ridiculous statistical achievements.
He's the only player in the last five years to make at least 900 threes and snag 500 steals, and Tyrese Haliburton is the only other guy in that span to amass at least 2,000 assists with fewer than VanVleet's 652 turnovers.
Enough with the individual numbers. Let's zoom out to VanVleet's impact on team success, where he somehow looks even better.
It's hard to know what to do with 2019-20, when VanVleet's Raptors were actually 2.3 points per 100 possessions worse with him on the floor. But the fact that his worst differential across the last four seasons was a plus-5.9 suggests we can write off that lone season, in which he registered the only negative number of his career, as an outlier.
VanVleet got an All-Star nod in 2021-22, but he's produced roughly similar numbers in each of the five seasons we're studying. If there were an All Half-Decade team, the individual stats and team-focused figures say he'd have a legitimate case to be on it.
Stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball Reference and Cleaning the Glass. Salary info via Spotrac.
Grant Hughes covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter (@gt_hughes), and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, where he appears with Bleacher Report's Dan Favale.
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