The 10 Most Surprising NBA Players This Season
The NBA season has been full of surprises, both good and bad.
The best surprises are when players vastly exceed expectations. The most disappointing ones come when players with high potential underperform.
There are plenty of candidates for most surprising players of the NBA season thus far. So let’s take a look at who has surprised people the most, either positively or negatively.
For this list, how surprising a player’s season has been is judged relative to preseason expectations. If a player was injured and he comes back strong despite people expecting his production to drop, that moves him up the list.
Likewise, people may have thought a player was going to take the next step in his development, but he hasn’t done that. That also counts as a surprise, though admittedly not as fun.
Now, here are the 10 most surprising players of the NBA season, along with a few honorable mentions.
Honorable Mentions
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These players haven't played exactly as people thought they would, but their play hasn't been quite unexpected enough to make it into the top 10.
Zaza Pachulia
Zaza Pachulia is averaging a double-double for the first time in his career. He’s 31 years old.
After the Dallas Mavericks lost out on DeAndre Jordan over the summer, Pachulia has been a surprisingly effective stand-in and helped Dallas stay in the playoff hunt in the Western Conference.
Greg Monroe
Milwaukee's big free-agent signing, Greg Monroe has been good but not great for a struggling Bucks team. His defensive win shares are down to 1.4 from 2.8 last season, according to Basketball-Reference.com. His slight defensive decline has been part of the reason the Bucks are allowing 103 points per game, 20th in the league.
Monroe was supposed to push Milwaukee closer to the top of the Eastern Conference. Instead, it's fallen back out of the playoffs. His rebounding and offensive production, however, have been right around what people would have expected. That keeps him out of the top 10.
Jae Crowder
Jae Crowder got more of an opportunity to play after getting traded to Boston from the Mavericks last year. This season, working as a full-time starter, he’s having the best year of his career.
The wing is averaging career highs in points, assists and rebounds, while also shooting a career-high 44.9 percent from the field. Crowder barely misses the top 10, however, because many Dallas fans suspected he could be a good starter on a team that played younger players more. That makes his ascension less of a surprise, and therefore he’s left out.
10. Isaiah Thomas
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When a player has started one game over the previous two seasons, it is reasonable to anticipate he will only be a role player.
Getting a spot on the All-Star team? That’s shocking.
That’s what Isaiah Thomas has done though. The Boston point guard is averaging 21.6 points and 6.6 assists per game.
Thomas was considered the third-best point guard in Phoenix this time a year ago behind Eric Bledsoe and Goran Dragic. Now he’s considered the third-best point guard in the entire Eastern conference. That’s a surprising turnaround.
The one thing holding Thomas back from a higher spot is his defense. Were he not a human turnstile on that end of the floor, he’d be higher on this list.
9. Anthony Davis
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MVP-level expectations before a season leave players with little room to astonish people. There’s plenty of room, however, for players to disappoint.
That has unfortunately been the case for Anthony Davis. Many thought this year would be the season he would step fully into MVP contention. The fourth-year forward has instead regressed, shooting worse from the field and the free-throw line.
Much of Davis’ woes can be attributed to his environment. The Pelicans were 1-11 to start the season thanks to a slew of injuries to key players. The lack of a supporting cast and a rough start to Alvin Gentry’s tenure as head coach hasn’t exactly given Davis the chance to thrive.
Regardless, Davis should be dominating the league right now. But those factors keep his season from being a total disappointment, and therefore higher on the list.
8. Wesley Matthews
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An Achilles tear can be one of the most devastating injuries in sports. Wesley Matthews tore his Achilles last season, and there were serious concerns about how good he could be after that kind of injury.
When Matthews signed with Dallas in the offseason, many thought he would miss the first few months of the season. But on opening night, there he was in the starting lineup. He’s started 44 of the Mavericks’ 48 games.
Matthews is shooting a career-low from three-point range, which is why he isn’t higher on the list. But the fact that he’s started almost all year and is one of the best players on a playoff team after that injury is remarkable.
7. Kent Bazemore
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The Hawks have taken a step back from their franchise-record winning pace from a year ago. But unlike people expected, it hasn’t been because of the loss of DeMarre Carroll.
That’s because Kent Bazemore has seamlessly stepped into Carroll’s role in the Atlanta offense. His averages in points (12.9), rebounds (4.5) and assists (2.4) are nearly identical to Carroll’s numbers from a year ago (12.3, 5.6 and 1.7). He’s also shooting better from beyond the arc than Carroll did, and he’s brought a similar level of defensive intensity on the wing.
Bazemore’s performance is even more impressive given that he wasn’t even projected to start before the year. That role was supposed to be Thabo Sefolosha’s. All that together makes him one of the more pleasant surprises of the year.
6. Kevin Durant
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As Bleacher Report’s Howard Beck pointed out before the season, there were questions about whether Kevin Durant could be the player he once was coming off his third major foot surgery.
Durant dismissed those fears at the time. It turns out he was right.
The former MVP is fourth in the league in scoring at 27 points a game. He’s doing that while sharing shots with Russell Westbrook.
Durant shoots over 50 percent despite shooting a lot of mid-range jumpers. Those tend to be less efficient shots for other players, but not Durant. In a league where three-point shooting and attacking the rim have become the highest valued skills, teams have a lot of trouble defending his style of offense.
Coming back from the injury to play at such a high level gets him on the list. But expectations weren’t quite low enough for him to be higher than No. 6.
5. Chris Bosh
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Less than a year ago, Chris Bosh had a blood clot on his lung that sidelined him from the trade deadline to the end of the season. The condition threatened his NBA career and his life.
This season, he’s played every game for Miami and leads the team in scoring. He's dispelled any lingering concerns about his health.
At 31 and coming off a major health scare, it was reasonable to think Bosh’s play might begin to decline this year. Instead, he’s having another All-Star season. Flouting both expectations and health issues is what lands him at No. 5.
4. C.J. McCollum
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C.J. McCollum had three career starts before this season. Expectations for him were nonexistent.
Shoved into the starting lineup this year with the departures of Wesley Matthews and Arron Afflalo, McCollum has combined with Damian Lillard to make one fun starting backcourt.
McCollum has more than tripled the number of shots he takes per game, from 5.9 last year to 18.4 this season. Yet he’s managed to slightly increase his field-goal percentage. He’s also playing more than twice as many minutes per game and shooting a career high from the free-throw line.
McCollum became one of the best shooting guards in the Western Conference after being a relative unknown last year. But he at least had played NBA basketball before, which keeps him from edging out the third player on this list.
3. Kristaps Porzingis
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Boos rained down at the 2015 NBA draft as the New York Knicks took Kristaps Porzingis with the No. 4 pick. He was believed to be a project who wouldn’t be able to contribute to a team for a couple of years.
The NBA also has a history of prospects from overseas getting drafted high and turning into spectacular busts. Exhibit A: Darko Milicic.
Porzingis, however, has exceed the expectations of even the most optimistic Knicks fans. The Latvian sensation has dunked his way into the starting lineup and is averaging 14 points, 7.8 rebounds and two blocks per game.
The rookie’s skill set has people straining to find comparisons. He is a 7-footer who can both play down low and shoot threes. Kevin Durant told Royce Young of ESPN this week that the rookie is a “unicorn.”
Porzingis earns the No. 3 spot over McCollum by a small margin. Porzingis gets a slight nudge because his success has come as a rookie. McCollum had at least been in the league for two years. So the Latvian gets the nod.
2. James Harden
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Fewer players had higher expectations coming into this season than James Harden. He was one of the top MVP candidates a year ago, and his team made it to the Western Conference Finals.
So when he and the Rockets got off to a 5-10 start, during which it fired head coach Kevin McHale, it was shocking. It was especially surprising since most of the team’s struggles came back to Harden.
Houston excelled last year because Harden was playing the best basketball of his life. He was getting to the free-throw line at a high rate (10.2 attempts per game). And he was second in the league in scoring behind Russell Westbrook at 27.4 points per game.
This season, he showed up to training camp out of shape, according to ESPN’s Zach Lowe and others. He’s shooting a career-low 34.2 percent from three-point range and is posting the lowest field-goal percentage since his rookie season in Oklahoma City.
Maybe the expectations for Harden were unfair, and Houston has rebounded from a rough start. But the downturn for him—and by extension the Rockets—was so sudden that he makes the second-highest spot on the list.
1. Stephen Curry
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Steph Curry won an MVP and an NBA championship last season. He had already firmly cemented himself as one of the best players in the NBA.
That’s why what Curry has accomplished this season is so astounding.
He has improved on his historic performance from a year ago in nearly every statistical category. He is scoring 6.1 more points per game. He is shooting 51.1 percent from the field (45.5 three-point percentage), compared to 48.7 percent (44.3 3-point percentage) last year.
He’s even grabbing 5.3 rebounds a game, the most in his career.
Even more impressive: He is shooting better from the field and from three-point range despite taking 2.5 more three-point shots a game. He’s taking more shots from farther away, and it’s made him more efficient.
Everyone expected Curry to continue to be great this season. No one expected him to improve his game to this degree. For that reason, he’s been the league’s most surprising player to this point.
