NBA Rookie Rankings: Jalen Williams' ascent and the 'wizard' Dyson Daniels (2024)

We’re closing in on the halfway point of the NBA season, which means it’s a great time to update The Athletic’s Rookie Rankings for the 2022-23 season.

This is turning out to be a strong rookie class, and there are more than 15 players making an impact across the league, which is a bit rare for a first-year crop of players.

If you need a refresher on this season’s initial rankings, check them out here, and remember, these are full-season rankings of the most effective rookies thus far. Additionally, for this iteration and all iterations moving forward, I’ve introduced the concept of a People’s Choice selection. I write about four players in-depth in each Rookie Rankings piece, but the week before the rankings are published, I’ll ask Twitter for one player about whom people want me to dive into. The player who gets the most votes wins. This time around, the People’s Choice selection was Oklahoma City’s Jalen Williams, a player who also moves up the board significantly.

(Stats are through Monday’s games)

Quick thoughts

• No change at No. 1. Paolo Banchero continues to have some efficiency questions, but those are questions that stop him from being an All-Star more than stop him from being Rookie of the Year. His ability to create shots, put pressure on the rim and make high-level passing reads on the move as a playmaker has been critical in Orlando’s recent mini-resurgence before dropping three in a row by 19 or 20 points. Prior to those losses, Orlando had been 8-8 since Banchero’s return to action as the team started to get better backcourt play next to Banchero, Franz Wagner and the rest of the frontcourt.

• The field is catching up a bit to Bennedict Mathurin at No. 2 but not enough to where anyone could jump him. Mathurin’s shot has abandoned him over the second quarter of the season, as he’s made just 22.5 percent from 3 in his last 19 games. Still, his aggressiveness attacking the rim while leading Indiana’s bench unit has led to more positives than negatives, and he’s still up over 17 points per game on the season. Mathurin hit a bit of a quick wall, so it’s incumbent upon him to figure out how to scale it. Mathurin was in a tier on his own in these rankings at No. 2 last time, but I would say that now he’s at the top of the same tier as the next four players ranked. He was not the second-best rookie in the second quarter of the season, but he stays here based on the strength of his first quarter.

• Jalen Williams, AJ Griffin and Keegan Murray are playing very solid, steady games and providing relatively efficient production as starting wings. Griffin’s floor spacing has been huge for Atlanta. Over his last 21 games, Griffin is averaging 12.5 points per game while shooting 46 percent from the field and 36 percent from 3. Murray has been very useful as the low-usage fifth man in Sacramento’s starting lineup, averaging 12.5 points on 44 percent from the field and 44 percent from six 3s per game.

• I really had an internal dialogue on Andrew Nembhard versus Jaden Ivey. Ivey’s counting numbers are better, but he’s not been particularly efficient or effective while playing for one of the league’s worst teams. Nembhard, on the other hand, is starting in the backcourt as the secondary ballhandler on a team that is surprising the world and sitting at 20-17 and sixth in the Eastern Conference. It’s hard to overemphasize how valuable that is even if the numbers don’t necessarily blow you off the page. He’s steady and a true embodiment of one of the most selfless teams in the league. The Pacers average the second-most passes in the league behind the Warriors, and that results in the second-most potential assists per game. Nembhard and Tyrese Haliburton are the drivers of that ball movement along with T.J. McConnell.

The former Gonzaga point guard is allowing Indiana to play the kind of basketball it wants. But I don’t think Detroit would be any better for having Nembhard than Ivey right now either, as Ivey’s rare ability to push the pace and aggressively create opportunities is huge for an offense that desperately needs easy buckets. It’s just two completely different contexts for evaluating lead guards often playing both on and off the ball. I ultimately went Ivey higher because production does matter on some level for rookies. But if you wanted to put Nembhard higher despite him averaging half as many points and fewer assists, there’s a case for it.

• The Walker Kessler defensive experience continues to roll on. He and Dyson Daniels are the clear top two defensive players in the class. We would have expected the on/off numbers to stabilize by now for Kessler, but they have remained ludicrous. Entering Tuesday, when When Kessler is on the court, the Jazz allow just 110.7 points per 100 possessions. When he’s off the court, the team allows 119.5. He’s swatting almost two shots in 19 minutes per game, which is fourth in the NBA. He contests everything inside, averaging over 10 contests per 36 minutes at the rim. And when he’s there, it remains almost impossible to finish over him. Opponents are shooting just 54.2 percent when Kessler is the primary rim protector, seventh-best in the league among the 31 centers who are contesting five shots at the basket per game.

• Don’t look now, but Jabari Smith Jr. has now played a longer stretch of positive games than negative games after his horror-show start to the season. At the time of our first Rookie Rankings in November, Smith was shooting 33.3 percent from the field and 30.2 percent from 3 over 17 games. Since that point, Smith has played 19 games and averaged 13.6 points per game on 44.2 percent from the field and 36.2 percent on six 3s per game. That’s just slightly below the league-average 57.1 true-shooting percentage. And throughout the entirety of the season, Smith has been one of the few bright spots on a bad Rockets defensive team due to his activity rotationally and willingness to help. Smith has lived up to his billing for a good stretch now, and he slides up the board five spots. Smith, Griffin and Daniels are the three biggest risers in this batch.

• Hello, Christian Braun! The Nuggets wing has been ultra-steady in his moments off the bench for a team that needed some real help on the wing. He’s constantly in the right place, making the right reads and playing basketball the right way within Denver’s unselfish ecosystem. The Nuggets tend to be successful when he’s out there. He and Daniels replace Christian Koloko and MarJon Beauchamp.

Beauchamp is simply a matter of Braun and Daniels rising way up the board and taking the spot from him. I’d have Beauchamp at No. 17 still, and he looks like a legit rotation player for the most part when Milwaukee uses him. In Koloko’s case, the defensive numbers seem a bit more noisy on the obscene on-offs than Kessler’s. His impact as a rim protector hasn’t been quite as pronounced, as opponents are making 60 percent of their shots when he is the primary defender, and he doesn’t quite contest as often as Kessler. Additionally, his offense is legitimately harmful out there, as teams really just don’t have to guard him. I certainly would never place all of Toronto’s half-court offensive woes at Koloko’s feet, but the opposing big being able to help off him all the time is part of what drags Toronto’s half-court offense to a screeching halt, which is the team’s most significant issue right now. Koloko absolutely looks like a hit in terms of a second-rounder exceeding expectations purely because of the defense, but he needs to do just a little more on offense.

Let’s dive deeper into four rookies of note, starting with our People’s Choice pick:

Jalen Williams (No. 3)

It’s not an exaggeration to say Williams was the most meteoric riser in basketball over the calendar year of 2022. A late-bloomer physically who shot up from 6-foot-3 to 6-foot-6 after committing to Santa Clara in high school, Williams was just on the periphery of the NBA Draft picture at the start of 2022, a curiosity in the West Coast Conference — a league that, outside of Gonzaga, had not produced a first-round pick in 20 years — because of his 7-foot-2 wingspan and prodigious production. Teams were interested in getting eyes on him and learning more about him, but very few actual NBA decision-makers had been out to see him by that point. Over the course of the pre-draft process, more scouts got eyes on him, and few players did more to help themselves than Williams did as he performed very well throughout both individual and team workouts. He proved that he wasn’t just a small-school statistical darling, taking it to high-major players he faced off against. That resulted in him being selected in the lottery because it’s really hard to find multi-skilled guards with NBA size, potential to morph into a secondary ballhandler, the capacity to make good decisions and a real likelihood to shoot.

As much as any team, that intersection of plus positional size with NBA-level skill has been what Oklahoma City’s front office has valued in recent years at the draft. Think about guys such as Josh Giddey, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Chet Holmgren, Tre Mann, Ousmane Dieng, Aleksej Pokuševski, Darius Bazley: What all of these guys have in common with Williams is that they all have ball skills and plus positional size/length. If these evaluations end up right, Oklahoma City is putting itself in position to be able to play five-out offense while also being able to swallow up the court with length defensively. Williams has thrived filling a lot of different gaps for Oklahoma City, and in the process, he has made himself an indispensable part of the team’s rebuild moving forward. Williams entered the starting lineup full-time about a month ago and has generated offense by keeping things simple around Giddey and Gilgeous-Alexander. Through Monday, he’s averaged 13.3 points, 4.7 rebounds and 3.3 assists on 52.7 percent from the field and 34 percent from 3.

It helps to play with someone who attracts as much defensive attention as Gilgeous-Alexander and someone who is as consistently smart as Giddey, but playing off great players is a skill. Williams fills gaps out on the break and constantly makes himself available running the court for easy buckets. He makes sharp cuts into the midrange and toward the rim and is really sharp at attacking closeouts, using his shot fake and length well to put the ball on the deck. The goal is to get Williams downhill, where he can use that 7-2 wingspan and powerful frame to ward off defenders and create angles toward the rim. Oklahoma City finds a variety of different ways to do that. Williams has made 67.2 percent of his shots at the rim this season, a virtual tie for the best mark among all rookies along with Pistons center Jalen Duren.

It’s not uncommon to see him act as the screener for Giddey on one possession then actually be the person bringing the ball up the court and attacking out of a ball screen himself the next. When he’s on-ball, he is aggressive but poised — clearly a player who excels at changing speeds but is still learning how to use his frame when he’s not already downhill by the time he hits the paint. He loves the little midrange pull-up between 10 and 18 feet, shots he’s taking about twice per game and hitting at about 49 percent. This has a chance to be a real weapon soon. Williams is excellent at getting downhill, but where he really has a chance to be lethal down the road is with his deceleration. Check out this play against the Spurs, where he gets downhill out of an early ball screen then hits the brakes, puts it behind his back, stops and pops from 14 feet. It’s hard to deal with guys who are this big who can stop and pop that quickly.

Williams has been Oklahoma City’s Swiss Army knife. He can set screens, sit in the dunker spot waiting for a dump-off, 45-cut from the wing, attack closeouts to shoot or pass or just simply spot up and take catch-and-shoot jumpers. Already, he’s an effective NBA player just by keeping it simple and being a versatile offensive weapon. Eventually, the shot is going to fall off the catch (he has clean mechanics and hit 39.6 percent last year from 3 at Santa Clara). But further growth will come when he gets even more comfortable using his frame inside the 3-point line.

Williams isn’t the most explosive player, and you see that at times with his finishing as an on-ball creator. While Williams has been an impactful player putting pressure on the rim and scoring, he hasn’t been quite as good in those situations when creating on the ball. On spot-up drives, he makes 48 percent at the rim. As a ballhandler in pick-and-roll chances, Williams is hitting 55 percent at the rim, a number that is great for a rookie with so much more room for growth. He has a great sense for how his length creates unique angles against defenders and allows him to be an effective below-the-rim finisher, but he sometimes struggles to maintain the advantage all the way to the rim.

Check out this play against Philadelphia, where Williams has a real advantage against Furkan Korkmaz. He gets Korkmaz off-balance and opens up the driving lane, but instead of using his frame to keep Korkmaz on his hip then using his hip and the rim to shield the ball from the defender, he ends up in between steps, going up off two feet and throwing up a wild left-hand layup attempt that caroms off the backboard.

Eventually, things are going to slow down more for Williams, his footwork is going to get cleaner on these drives, and he’s going to be weaponized at a really high level as a secondary playmaker. Once the shot starts falling, it’s very easy to imagine him as an 18-point, six-rebound, three-assist per game guy who plays exceedingly well off superstars. I’d have Williams as a pretty clear first-team All-Rookie guy right now. He’s efficient, smart and knows his limitations while also still exploring them a bit as a young player. He’s a clear keeper for this core.

Dyson Daniels (No. 9)

Welcome to the party, Dyson Daniels! He missed out on the last rankings largely because of minutes. But he’s looked ready from the jump, and this ranking should reflect that. Daniels is the best defensive player on the perimeter in this rookie class, bar none. He is a wizard. It’s actually hard to overemphasize how good he is on that end for a teenager. The Pelicans have on-ball defensive aces such as Herb Jones and Jose Alvarado, and the team is already giving Daniels the critical late-game, on-ball assignments knowing he’s the best option. How about this one from the end of the Pelicans’ game against the Wolves last week: Everyone on the court knew the ball was going to Anthony Edwards on the inbound pass. The Pelicans plunked Daniels, the 6-7 lead guard with a 6-11 wingspan and elite lateral quickness, on him. It did not go well for Edwards, who got zero separation before settling for a miracle hoist.

Minnesota falls short in New Orleans.#RaisedByWolves 118#Pelicans 119 pic.twitter.com/bvLmU8kZHy

— Bally Sports North (@BallySportsNOR) December 29, 2022

Think about how ridiculous that is. The Pelicans — the best, deepest team in the Western Conference — are using a rookie as a defensive stopper late in games against some of the best scorers the league has to offer, and he’s finding real success comparably. Here’s the thing though: Daniels’ on-ball defense is awesome, and it’s not even the best part of his defensive repertoire. He’s one of the best transition defenders in the league because he has this rare sense of how to defend two-on-one situations and elite hand-eye coordination when going up for early blocks and strips. And rotationally, his instincts as a scramble defender are staggering. He constantly finds the right hole to plug, and his size and length plus willingness to fight gives him every chance to switch onto multiple different player types and not be placed into a mismatch.

The best example of that I’ve seen this season came against the Pistons, when Daniels navigated a Bojan Bogdanović–Isaiah Stewart ball screen and switched onto Stewart. Stewart tried to post him thinking he had a mismatch, but Daniels just calmly fought around him, got high and three-quarter fronted him to deny the ball. Stewart gave up and spaced to the corner. Bogdanović drove and he sat there in the lane to help, forcing the kickout to Stewart. Daniels heavily closed out on Stewart knowing he can get back into the play even if he pump fakes. Stewart does just that, and Daniels recognized immediately how his team has helped around him. He found his man, which ends up being Bogdanović again. And as he arrived, Detroit hits Bogdanović on a reversal, which leads to an attempted shot that Daniels contests.

I’m not exaggerating when I say there are few better, more versatile defenders I’ve seen across the entire NBA this season. People rightfully melted down about Jones last year on the defensive end, and he was one of the more rookie-ready defenders we’ve seen in the league in a few years. Daniels is better. He’s the kind of guy the Pelicans are going to be able to weaponize in the playoffs as a defensive stopper against the league’s best.

In part, they’ve been able to do that because Daniels has been just proficient enough on offense to where teams have to pay attention to him. He has made 39 percent of his 3s and is a tremendous, unselfish passer as a driver and ball-screen distributor, averaging nearly three assists on more than 2-to-1 assist-to-turnover ratio over his last 17 games. Undeniably, he’s the guy teams will choose to sag off to try to slow down Zion Williamson’s drives and post-ups, but he’s such a quick processor and ball mover that he’s going to keep defenses in rotation as they scramble to get back into position. On some level, I think Daniels is probably going to have to get a bit more selfish, purely just to prove he is capable of being a threat on the court. He has a tendency to just make the right play and move the ball along all the time. Eventually, teams will scout for that and force him to beat them. It might help him to get proactive ahead of that before teams start to fully adjust against him. For as long as he can keep that up, Daniels will keep eating into the minutes of the more veteran players above him.

I strongly account for minutes in these rankings, but I also account for carving out a role on a good team, and Daniels has done that. The Pelicans can’t not play Daniels as long as he keeps his offense on par as teams start to adjust further to his unselfish play. He’s forced their hand despite the fact that they’re arguably the deepest team in the league. Daniels slides way up the board, and I’d comfortably have him All-Rookie right now.

Jeremy Sochan (No. 12)

Sochan is probably the guy I wanted to push up the board most but just couldn’t. His run of positive play doesn’t quite outweigh his offensive struggles early this season, where during his first 30 games he averaged just 7.0 points per game on 45.5/17.7/45.8 shooting. But I loved Sochan pre-draft, and we’re starting to see the full potential of his skill set in recent weeks. He’s averaging 15 points, 7.2 rebounds and 3.3 assists over his last six while improving his efficiency across the board and being willing to try different things, including one-handed free throws (shots he’s made at a 70.4 percent clip!).

Teams are largely trying to hide their most deficient defender on Sochan, and he’s figuring out a way to make them pay by being consistently active and aggressive. The Mavericks tried to slide Luka Dončić on him in a recent game, and Sochan constantly worked to face-cut and back-cut him while Dončić would get caught ball-watching. Here’s a trio of off-ball cutting plays from that game, where Sochan scored 20 on 12 shots. He made two 3s too, but his willingness to make Dončić try to work on the other end resulted in probably his second-best game so far.

Sochan has terrific natural instincts, and his size and length allow him to roam all over the place and make an impact on both ends. He throws high-level passes on the move in flashes that make you believe he can be a legitimate secondary ballhandler by the time he’s 25. In general, Sochan’s been a pretty good defender for a rookie and has been in the right spots. Again, these are the guys teams are constantly searching for league-wide. But he also gets real “welcome to the league, kid” moments, such as in that Dallas game, when he logged the most minutes as the primary defender on Dončić in a 51-point masterclass by the Slovenian superstar. Sochan really struggled to navigate screens the Mavericks set for Dončić, with Luka continuing his heater from the past two weeks. In many ways, Dončić is the final boss of the league for perimeter defenders, so more than anything, this should be seen as good experience for Sochan to get as he works to develop into the kind of multi-talented, versatile defender he has a real chance to become.

Most of the time, Sochan looks completely inexperienced out there, like he’s still learning where all of his limbs and length can go and how he can best utilize what is still a burgeoning skill level. But I do think his feel for the game and instinctual awareness of how to play is pretty real. It’s all going to come down to where the skill level settles in. Does he turn into an average shooter? Can some of the nascent ballhandling moments we’ve seen this season become more consistent in terms of his handle and comfort level and turn into something real that the Spurs can count on in important moments? Sochan’s upside is very high. It’s hard to find guys who are 6-9 with long arms who can move the way he does and fly around the court on both ends. But he needs a couple of summers of skill development before we know exactly what he’s capable of becoming.

Jalen Duren (No. 13)

The Pistons made a really sharp trade on draft night to move up and acquire Duren at No. 13, and it looks like they’re going to reap the rewards throughout the next decade. Already, Duren looks like he’ll at the very least be a starting-caliber center despite being the youngest player in the NBA at just 19 years old. He entered the starting lineup on Dec. 9 and has consistently held down a 30-minute-per-night role, although it is worth noting the Pistons are one of the worst teams in the league in large part due to their defense, and Duren hasn’t exactly set the world on fire on that end of the floor yet.

First though, the good. Above all when watching Duren, it’s hard to believe how strong he is already. We knew how physically developed he was entering the NBA, but I don’t think we quite knew the way even many of the most established centers would simply just bounce off him. Since entering the starting lineup, Duren is averaging 11.4 rebounds per game, and he basically establishes his position at will. He averages 3.3 offensive rebounds per game, but moreover, his team gets about 27 percent of potential offensive rebounds when he’s out on the court, a number that would place the Pistons in the top seven league-wide. He’s currently top 10 in the NBA in terms of points off putbacks too, averaging 2.5 per game.

Duren also is a real threat as a finisher inside. Opposing teams have to keep track of him, or he’s going to sit in the dunker spot and wait for a lob. The Pistons haven’t quite weaponized him yet out of ball screens, but in the moments when he’s gotten his chances, he’s done pretty well and looks like a legitimate gravitational force. Pistons fans should be extremely familiar with this player type. A lot of what Duren has brought to the table so far is reminiscent of exactly a decade ago in 2012-13, when Andre Drummond was starting his career in Detroit. Drummond was another teenage lottery pick whose tools slightly underwhelmed in college but immediately translated in a different way to the NBA due to its spacing. Drummond went on to make multiple All-Star teams before the league began to pass him by in the late 2010s due to his defensive deficiencies in space.

And much like Drummond in Detroit, Duren is still trying to find his sea legs on defense. The good news on that front: It’s to be expected for a teenager playing 30 minutes per night in the NBA, and these reps will be invaluable for him long term as he tries to figure out his positioning and how to best utilize his length. He has some good moments with weakside rotations, and he has some moments out in space when he can slide with guards and look like there is some switchability upside in his toolkit. That — along with modern development within the construct of the role he’ll be asked to play in space — is why I would bet on Duren to be fine on defense eventually. He has the tools to do it. But he’s really having issues across the board right now in terms of recognition and anticipation. Despite being 6-11, all sorts of strong and having a 7-5 wingspan, teams are shooting 61.9 percent at the rim when he contests, a below-average mark.

Moreover though, he’s an even bigger issue playing in ball screens. This one isn’t all on him. A lot of Detroit’s guards and wings outside of Killian Hayes struggle to navigate screens, putting a lot of pressure on Duren. But undeniably, he’s not cleaning up any messes, either. Here are a couple of clips from the last few weeks where you’ll see different examples of what I’m talking about. In the first one, Duren sinks too far back to ever bother Zach LaVine’s pull-up jumper. Teams generally want offensive players to take those shots, but that’s too easy for a star player like LaVine. You can’t let him walk into one like that. In the second one, Markelle Fultz goes around a ball screen and turns the corner on Duren far too easily to get to the basket for an easy layup. Duren has to at least keep Fultz in front of him and contained here.

Duren ends up in that no-man’s land area far too often or ends up shading a bit too far toward defending the big before his guard is back in the play. This is also kind of reductive, but he’s also just not very active. He ends up playing with his hands down too often and doesn’t get the most out of his length in these settings. He’s someone who can take up an immense amount of space in these types of sequences, and he doesn’t. Again, the Pistons’ defensive infrastructure is not good by NBA standards. There was some semblance of hope early in December as the Pistons paired Duren with Isaiah Stewart, but teams pretty quickly figured that out and have started hammering that two-man combo to the tune of a 125.9 defensive rating since Dec. 15, a number quite a bit worse than the team’s 119.8 mark in that span.

It would be an enormous surprise if Duren was ready to handle this type of minutes load defensively, so I don’t think this is all that concerning yet. And the finishing and rebounding he’s bringing to the table is enough to be plenty excited about long term given how young he is. There’s still a pretty wide potential group of outcomes for Duren if he doesn’t figure out his ball-screen technique. But with the way his tools have translated already, he has all of the upside to be a top-10 center in the league if he can clean things up as he continues to get experience.

Related listening

(Top photo of Jalen Williams: Zach Beeker / NBAE via Getty Images)