5 NBA Players Regressing the Most Right Now
With only about a quarter of the season remaining, it's getting harder to dismiss trends as the result of small samples. That is particularly true for a set of players who have failed to match last year's standards and are now dealing with more prolonged declines.
That's a key thing to remember here, as we lay out several players whose career arcs are angling the wrong way. One-year blips aren't generally enough to qualify. We need more than that to officially slap on the dreaded "regression" label.
One other note: We're excluding LeBron James from consideration. It's a minor miracle that he's playing in the NBA at all, given his age. That he's still performing at a fringe All-Star level defies every career-trajectory norm. Who cares if he's not the best player in the league anymore?
Other than that, everyone's fair game.
Ja Morant, Memphis Grizzlies
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This isn't just about the suspensions, and persistent injury issues are only relevant insofar as they're related to the athletic decline of Ja Morant, once one of the most physically overwhelming players in the league.
His slippage is practically career-defining in one key sense: As his ability to explode around the basket has eroded, so has his effectiveness.
In the nine games he played in 2023-24, Morant shot 71.4 percent inside three feet. That number fell to 69.1 percent last season and has bottomed out at 65.8 percent in the 20 games he's played this year.
Overall, his two-point conversion rate is at a career-worst 47.3 percent, cripplingly bad for a guard who's shot just 31.1 percent from beyond the arc over seven seasons.
It's easy to fixate on the off-court concerns and health issues that have conspired to keep the one-time top-10 MVP finisher out of All-Star consideration for the last three years. In theory, those problems are reversible.
Harder to change: Morant has yet to meaningfully add any new skills (deep shooting, defensive focus) to a package that is rapidly losing the ones that used to make him great.
Draymond Green, Golden State Warriors
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Draymond Green finished third in Defensive Player of the Year voting last season. He won't reach that level this year, but he's still among the most intelligent and impactful forces in the league on that end.
The Golden State Warriors' defense is still best when he's on the floor, and his individual Defensive Estimated Plus/Minus is in the 80th percentile overall.
This is about what's gone so very wrong on the other end.
Never known for his scoring efficiency, Green is on a five-year slide in that department. His true shooting percentage was three percent better than the league average in the 2021-22 championship season, but it has dipped every year since and now sits nine percent below the league average.
Though his facilitation skills remain elite for a player who technically qualifies as a big man (98th percentile in assist percentage for his position), the 35-year-old's turnovers are now an enormous problem.
The Warriors' offense is 3.7 points per 100 possessions better when he's off the floor, partly because of the miscues but also because he simply cannot punish defenses who ignore him like he used to.
For the first time ever, it's plausible to argue Golden State is sometimes better off without Green in the lineup.
Keegan Murray, Sacramento Kings
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Keegan Murray set the all-time record for three-pointers made by a rookie in 2022-23, and it's pretty much been downhill from there.
In fairness, his second season brought some eye-opening defensive improvements. That coincided with a drop from 41.1 percent from deep to 35.8 percent, though, which effectively canceled out the gains.
Last season saw Murray's three-point hit rate slide to 34.3 percent, and he attempted just 0.9 free-throws per game despite averaging 34.3 minutes.
After starting this season with an injury, the 2022 No. 4 overall pick is all the way down to 27.9 percent from deep and is turning the ball over more often than ever.
It doesn't help that the Sacramento Kings have struggled to stay in the playoff mix this year, but nobody is talking about Murray as one of the league's best young defensive forwards anymore, either.
Maybe it feels unfair to focus so much on his slide as a three-point shooter and defender, but it's not like he was ever billed as anything more than a three-and-D prospect. In getting progressively worse at the two things he once seemed so certain to provide, his value is cratering.
Still 25, Murray has the best shot to rehabilitate his career of anyone on this list. Getting out of Sacramento might be all it takes.
Trae Young, Washington Wizards
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Trae Young is a fascinating figure in this exercise, as you could make the case he's been in decline since roughly 2021.
That was the last time he graded out as a singularly elite driver of offense, as the Atlanta Hawks were 12.5 points per 100 possessions better on that end with him in the game.
He's been a consistently positive on-off offensive force in every year since, but never to that degree and, increasingly, never without doing major damage to his team's defense.
Some of Young's slide owes to the league cracking down on his specific style of foul-baiting. The broadly diminishing value of small guards is another factor. But besides those outside influences, his actual production is dipping—even as he made All-Star teams in 2023-24 and 2024-25.
For starters, we've moved way beyond the point where Young should be considered an objectively good three-point shooter. He hit just 30.5 percent of his career-low 5.9 deep attempts per game with the Hawks this year, down from 34.0 percent last season and 37.3 percent in 2023-24.
Still an elite pick-and-roll passer, the 27-year-old is most effective as a ball-dominant, defining force for his team. The problem is that he's no longer such an elite overall offensive player that anyone can justify giving him that large of a role when it means making major compromises on defense.
There's a reason the Washington Wizards didn't have to give up anything but mostly expiring salary to acquire Young, an unthinkable price just a couple of years ago.
Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Memphis Grizzlies
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It wasn't so long ago that Kentavious Caldwell-Pope was the prototypical role-playing 2 on a title-winner. He did it with the Denver Nuggets in 2023 and was a key reason the Los Angeles Lakers secured a ring in 2020.
The shutdown defense isn't what it used to be, as KCP graded out this season with a negative Defensive Estimated Plus/Minus figure for the first time since he was in an ill-defined role with the Washington Wizards in 2022.
And though finger surgery ended this season early, Caldwell-Pope's other critical skill, three-point shooting, was already in the process of pronounced decline.
After burying at least 38.5 percent of his treys every year from 2019-20 to 2023-24, his hit rate dipped to 34.2 percent last year and was all the way down to 31.6 percent with Memphis.
The 33-year-old's points-per-game average are on a five-year free fall, and his effective field-goal percentage has gone down in each of the last four. Ditto for his Box Plus/Minus, which was a troubling minus-2.5 this season, the lowest figure since his rookie year.
Maybe the finger surgery will make a difference going forward, and perhaps Caldwell-Pope has another meaningful run in him if he winds up on a competitive team. It's hard to ignore how much better he looked with the Lakers and Nuggets when they were chasing rings than he did with the Wizards and these tanking Grizzlies.
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 Bluesky and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, where he appears with Bleacher Report's Dan Favale.
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