Miami's Hassan Whiteside Is Clearly the NBA's Most Surprising Player

The current NBA season has come with the usual array of surprise stories.

Chicago Bulls guard Jimmy Butler, Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert and Toronto Raptors guard Kyle Lowry have outperformed expectations, while Anthony Davis and Kyle Korver continue to flirt with historic seasons. Butler, especially, has turned heads.

On the other hand, a handful of notable players—particularly Cleveland’s Kevin Love and Charlotte’s Lance Stephenson—have failed to live up to their hype.

However, the league’s most unexpected performance thus far has clearly come from Miami center Hassan Whiteside, a seven-footer with a long and checkered past.

Virtually unknown before the season, Whiteside has become a critical part of the Heat’s playoff aspirations. He has shored up their interior defense, gobbled up rebounds and demonstrated surprising nuance on the offensive end.

Stars emerge every year, but Whiteside’s performance is of particular surprise for three reasons.

His Journey

Easily the most remarkable part of Whiteside’s ascent to relevance is the path he took to Miami. Grantland’s Kirk Goldsberry described Whiteside’s career arc earlier this month, but the gist of it is this.

After one year at Marshall University, Whiteside was a 2010 second-round draft pick of the Sacramento Kings. He spent the next two years bouncing between Sacramento and the D-League before leaving in 2012 to sign with Amchit Club, a Lebanese team. A year later, Whiteside was playing in China, averaging a double-double for the Sichuan Blue Whales.

In late 2013, Whiteside returned to Lebanon. Less than eight months later, he was back in China. After only 17 games, Whiteside returned to the U.S., spending a year moving back and forth between the Memphis Grizzlies and two D-League teams before finally signing with Miami in November of last year. 

In sum: Whiteside was drafted by Sacramento, spent two years in the D-League, moved to Lebanon, left for China, returned to Lebanon, moved back to China, signed with Memphis, went back to the D-League and finally signed in Miami.

Today, the 25-year-old is the starting NBA center on a probable playoff team. The Heat currently hold the eighth seed in the Eastern Conference.

This alone is enough to crown Whiteside as the season’s biggest surprise. It's fairly common for players with superstar potential to bust. It is far less common for unheralded players to become superstars out of nowhere.

Whiteside is the season’s biggest surprise largely because his story is so unusual and unlikely.

His Stats

Given his career arc, it would have been plenty surprising for Whiteside to put up even league-average numbers. But he has done far more than that. Consider the following (stats courtesy of SI.com):

One of those names is not like the others. If someone quit watching the NBA in 2012, then looked at this chart today, their first question would be, “Who is Hassan Whiteside?”

In the rankings above, Whiteside is surrounded by the NBA’s top talent. He is the only name on the list who isn’t a perennial All-Star or MVP candidate. Furthermore, as Goldsberry noted, Whiteside ranks at or near the top of the league in blocks, field-goal percentage and rim protection.

Playing an average of less than 20 minutes per game, Whiteside has averaged 10 points, 8.6 rebounds and 2.4 blocks.

Given that few fans had even heard of him six months ago, it would have been surprising for Whiteside to earn an NBA roster spot in the first place. In light of his star-caliber performance, however, his emergence is particularly startling.

His Team

When LeBron James left Miami for Cleveland last summer, he left behind a host of important questions.

After four years of contention and two championships, the Heat appeared unlikely to succeed without the world’s best player. Many doubted that Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade would be enough to contend for a title.

According to ESPN.com, Bosh was rumored to be leaving for Houston, while Wade—aging and injury-plagued—has been on the decline for years.

Would team president Pat Riley make a splash and try to replace James with another superstar? Would he start over and begin the rebuilding process? Would the team re-sign Bosh add some role players, and hope to compete without James?

At one point, the entire Miami starting lineup was unclear. There was no shortage of questions. But none of them, of course, involved Whiteside.

It would be one thing for an unexpected star to emerge in Charlotte, Detroit or Utah. Small-market teams lacking realistic title hopes tend to receive less media scrutiny than high-profile contenders.

When a star emerges out of nowhere in a smaller market, it could reasonably be assumed that part of the reason nobody saw it coming was the lack of attention paid to that player’s team.

But Whiteside didn’t sign with the Jazz. He signed with Miami, a team coming off four straight years of title contention and scrambling to replace the world’s best player. The Heat were under plenty of scrutiny. And, still, nobody saw him coming.

All of this makes Whiteside’s emergence even more surprising. Not only did he take a comically circuitous route to the pros, not only has he played like an All-Star, but he did this in Miami, a big-market franchise with a huge fanbase and loads of media attention.

How is it possible that nobody predicted this? All 30 teams had a chance to sign him and passed. The media paid his signing virtually no attention. Now, he’s being mentioned as a cornerstone of Miami’s future.

Star players emerge unexpectedly every year, in every league. But not since Jeremy Lin have we seen a story like this in the NBA.

Whiteside’s tale may not carry the cultural significance of Linsanity, but his story is still like something out of a movie. He is indisputably the biggest surprise of the NBA season thus far. With luck, Whiteside will continue to shine.

Unless otherwise noted, statistics courtesy of NBA.com.