In a first-round loss to the Rockets, Ingles was stifled into five of the worst games of his career. We saw last season what Middleton can do in a simple, streamlined role: make a career-high 179 three-pointers (on 38% shooting), give a superstar all the room he needs to work, and carry second-unit lineups in need of his shot-making.

He simply needs a little help creating the space to use them, and enough help on-hand to prevent their overuse.Thaddeus Young’s game is 100% mortar, a feat of cohesion and structure.

There’s not a fear factor with Beverley so much as an awareness of all the trouble he’ll cause. They’re also only a glimpse of a much larger picture, starting with an 82-game regular season and possibly extending through a deep playoff run. Then, on defense, he takes up the most possible space in the middle of the floor. In short, you need Al Horford.

What’s a team to do with a player like Barnes, who is overqualified as a role player but ill-suited to be a star? He certainly looks like a star, given how often he works with the ball in his hands and the flair with which he breaks down a defender off the dribble.

His give-a-shit quotient is just off the charts. If you have a megawatt playmaker like LeBron James on the roster, Love fills one role. Giannis himself averaged 27.7 PPG in the regular season and 25.5 PPG in the playoffs, both to sterling efficiency. If there’s a need for his team to adjust defensive styles on the fly, Aminu can shift from showing to trapping to switching without issue. Or it might even start earlier: before a screen is ever set, where Walker uses a subtle step to set up his defender to be creamed. It’s to push defenders to the point of panic.For Walker, that could be as simple as hesitating in the space behind the screen, forcing more conservative defenses into a gut check. There is nothing in the NBA more destabilizing than a great player forcing his way out. Smart’s attempts obviously come much easier.

But it’s so much easier to stomach his awful defense and learning-on-the-job playmaking when he’s able to both convert difficult shots and create easy ones.Any player who relies on three-point shooting as much as Danny Green does (they comprise nearly 70% of his shot attempts) will trudge through some uneven play, perhaps even a poorly timed slump in the thick of the Eastern Conference finals. Dončić posted a rookie line (21.2 PPG, 7.8 RPG, 6.0 APG) matched only by Oscar Robertson. Instead, he refashioned himself as one of the league’s premiere stretch fives. It’s fair to wonder whether those numbers would have held, though not to deny the talents that made them possible. The problem wasn’t that Hayward’s contributions were quiet or subtle.

Good spacing makes every driver look better. No one would soon confuse Favors with a superstar. There’s just nothing conventional about Simmons, nor the way his passing can change a game. This ranking is not a judgment but an acknowledgement. Young teams without much in the way of stars or infrastructure can lean on Valančiūnas to produce, just as the Grizzlies did.

Too many of his lobs float wildly off-course. So much is on the table for Dončić because of the way his size (at 6’7’’) interacts with his skill set. It’s not entirely his fault, but there are reasons why Randle hasn’t yet been to the playoffs or been on a team that won more than 35 games.Last time we saw Jusuf Nurkić in uniform, he was carted off the court with a gruesome compound fracture in his left leg. Could he chart a developmental course to mirror Draymond Green? That work just might not come as naturally as when Dinwiddie creates for himself.As a second-year player filling in a starting role, Derrick White scored well enough to demand that the Nuggets adjust their coverage in a playoff series. It remains to be seen whether Booker can really be himself in a role off the ball alongside another high-usage star, though to this point he’s seemed less comfortable when not in control. These days, Horford is more of a perimeter player who picks his spots in the post.

Hield can put pressure on a defense just by running the floor, and does so tirelessly. Yet in playing such a low-risk game, a team styled around Aldridge imposes a cap on what it can achieve. If Porzingis is anything resembling the player he was or could be, this ranking might look ridiculous.

So Horford takes a more cautious approach that’s lighter in raw production, all for the sake of being there for his team when it counts.

A lot happened in the NBA in the 2010s. Lopez, at 7’0”, will gladly bring those defenders inside to score over them.

Even if it’s not visually striking, there’s only so many ways to talk around the fact that among volume scorers, only Giannis Antetokounmpo and Stephen Curry were more efficient than Gallo was last season.It’s hard to overstate just how jarring the transition would be from co-headlining a fairly standard NBA offense with the Clippers to working as a third or fourth option for the Sixers, who rely on one of the most idiosyncratic systems in the league. It’s very easy to like someone who does so much for the sake of the team and so little for himself. Check out every team in the NBA's best play of the decade. Let’s reminisce on the best showdowns we have seen from the past 10 seasons. The conversation around the rise and fall of NBA players tends to exaggerate things; every veteran who takes a step back is clearly washed, and every young player who takes a step forward is an inevitable star.

While playing on a surgically repaired foot last season, Love still posted a rebound rate that would have ranked in the top five. Top 100 Handles and Crossovers of the Decade. Let the stars be stars. Bam Adebayo is at his best when he runs and he knows it. How could a player like that—a player who finished third in MVP voting—rank as low as ninth?The answer, unfortunately, starts with George undergoing offseason surgery on both a torn labrum in his right shoulder It’s a tribute to George’s game that he ranks in the top 10 regardless, firmly in superstar territory.