NBA Rookie Rankings: Meet the new challenger to Paolo Banchero's throne (2024)

With a few weeks of the NBA season remaining, it’s time to update The Athletic’s Rookie Rankings for 2022-23. And for the first time in months, we have a real challenger to Paolo Banchero at No. 1.

It’s moving day, with Pacers wing Bennedict Mathurin falling out of a top-three spot, Oklahoma City wing Jalen Williams making his move up the rankings and late-season bigs emerging into rotation players.

If you need a refresher on the most recent rankings, check them out here. Remember, these are full-season rankings of the most effective rookies thus far. Additionally, a few months ago, I introduced the concept of a People’s Choice selection. I write about four players in-depth in each Rookie Rankings piece, but rather than choose all four myself, I now ask my Twitter followers to choose the fourth. The player who gets the most votes wins.

This time, the People’s Choice selection was the Thunder’s Jaylin Williams, their second-round pick from Arkansas who enters these rankings for the first time.

Ranking notes

• Paolo Banchero remains No. 1, but he has company in the top tier, and his grip on the Rookie of the Year award is looser than ever. He’s the top option on the Orlando Magic and undeniably deals with more defensive attention than any other rookie because of his polished offensive game. Having said that, Banchero’s production has tailed off in his last 20 games. He’s averaging just under 19 points while shooting 40.4 percent from the field and 21.4 percent from 3, and he’s getting to the line slightly less often than he did early in the season. Because of that, his true shooting percentage over that time has dipped to 48.1, nearly 10 points below the league average.
• In contrast, as we’ll dive into below, Jalen Williams is surging in his most recent 20 games, averaging 18.1 points while shooting 55.9 percent from the field and 47.4 percent from 3. He has a 64.9 true shooting percentage in that time.
• These are full-season rankings, and Banchero has been playing well from day one. But if he continues along this inefficient trajectory while Williams continues making the star leap I discuss in the next section, there should be a real conversation about Rookie of the Year.
• Jaden Ivey makes a move up the board because he’s getting much more comfortable every time he takes the court. This isn’t a blip:he’s had a two-month run now of really strong play.
• Bennedict Mathurin falls because the scoring has dried up. In the 14 games before getting hurt March 9 against Houston, Mathurin averaged just 13.2 points on inefficient shooting while getting to the line less than in the first half of the season. Given that Mathurin’s only real impact on the game is scoring right now, it’s hard to ignore that he’s averaging just 15.9 points on 42.6 percent shooting from the field and 25.2 percent from 3 since his strong 21-game run to start the season,.
• The first-team All-Rookie race is shaping up to be a six-person affair for five spots between Banchero, Williams, Walker Kessler, Ivey, Mathurin and Keegan Murray. Banchero, Williams and Kessler are pretty locked in. I’d go Ivey and Mathurin for those final two spots, in part because Murray’s last six weeks have been a bit rougher than what he’d previously shown. But this is going to come down to the wire.
• Jeremy Sochan continues to get better every game. Entering Thursday, he’s averaged 16.7 points, 6.6 rebounds and three assists over his last 12 games. He flies around athletically and makes things happen. I remain remarkably high on him long term.
• Tari Eason moves up to No. 8 because he continually makes an impact by playing hard. AJ Griffin falls from No. 6 to No. 9 because he’s outside of the rotation under new Hawks coach Quin Snyder.
• Jabari Smith Jr. has started to progress to his mean as a shooter. A lights-out marksman at Auburn, Smith was one of the worst shooters in the league for the first 55 games of the season. But over his last 14 games, Smith is averaging 15.1 points and 7.9 rebounds while hitting 44.4 percent from the field and 35.3 percent from 3. In his last six games, he’s up to a blistering 50 percent from 3. His double-double performances against Boston, Chicago and Indiana were as terrific as the numbers showed. He looked like the kind of dynamic two-way shot maker the Rockets expected when they took him at No. 3 overall. He’s peaking at the right time to go into the offseason with some confidence, which was missing from his game over the first two-thirds of the season.

Jalen Williams is not just a starter. He’s a future star

It’s hard to exaggerate how good the No. 12 pick from Santa Clara has been this season. He’s been efficient and sharp on offense. He takes on tough defensive assignments. His versatility allows him to seamlessly shift roles and be usedin any way the Thunder want. He can grab rebounds and go on the break. He can be the primary ballhandler in ball screens. He can make plays when the ball is swung to the opposite side, whether using a quick-hitting screen or simply as a spot-up attacking threat. He can be the screener and roller to the rim, or sit in the dunker spot under the hoop and wait for an outlet. His 69 dunks are behind only Trey Murphy and Kenyon Martin Jr. among wings this season. Throughout the season, he’s looked like the perfect complementary starter next to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Josh Giddey.

But the leap Williams has taken over the last six weeks should give Oklahoma City’s front office reason to believe he can be more than all that. I certainly think he will be more than all that. Williams looks like a future star, and the 14 games he has played since Feb. 7 have been the most impressive run any rookie has had all season. He’s averaged 20 points, 5.2 rebounds, 4.6 assists and 2.3 steals while shooting 56.3 percent from the field, 47.5 percent from 3 and 86.5 percent from the line. The Thunder, in the midst of a surprising push for the Play-In Tournament, are 8-6 in that run. No rookie’s play is impacting the bottom line of a postseason contender like Williams’.

He still does most of his damage inside the arc, with a weird mix of old-school tricks and new-school drives on well-spaced courts. There is never a point when he looks reckless or out of control. He’ll spin into a beautiful cross-corner kick-out pass that somehow makes it through a tight window on one possession. On the next, he’ll attack with a scoring package around the rim that wouldn’t look out of place back in the 1980s. Even though he dunks often, he’s not just a dunker around the rim, possessing an array of beautiful step-through pivots and pump fakes to get players in the air. He’ll throw up magical running hook shots, like the one below against Brooklyn earlier this week, when he used his 7-foot-2 wingspan to softly loft the ball over the 7-foot-4 wingspan of potential All-Defense center Nic Claxton.

It’s hard to find players like Williams who excel finishing both below and above the rim. Possessing a 6-foot-6 frame with all sorts of physical strength, Williams uses his frame to its utmost potential. Players defending him one-on-one or rotating from help positions can’t bump him off the ball. He initiates contact and shields his defender away from the rim exceptionally well. If someone bumps him going toward the rim, his center of gravity is so strong that it’s hard to knock him off-balance even when he’s in the air. His length allows him to extend and finish at the rim, much like Gilgeous-Alexander does so well. When your hand is almost always right next to the rim even if you’re just inches off the ground, it’s easier to finish than if it’s farther away. That’s a simplification — players work tirelessly on how to best utilize their extension and create angles at the basket — but it’s also true that Williams’ long arms give him a real advantage over his peers.

They also make him a rare passing weapon on drives that defenders haven’t quite adjusted to yet. His vision on its own is terrific, but he creates angles around defenders by extending his arms to complete high-degree-of-difficulty passes almost behind defenders’ backs. He’s become one of the league’s kings of the wrap-around pass. Here’s one against San Antonio earlier this month after Spurs big man Charles Bassey came to help.

All of this is before discussing the other end of the floor, where Williams has become impactful due to his size, ability to create steals and willingness to take on tough assignments. Over the Thunder’s last 15 games, they’re outscoring opponents by eight points per 100 possessions in Williams’ 433 minutes, per the NBA stats site. You can make a case that Williams, and not fellow high-minute starters Giddey and Lu Dort, has been the secondary force driving wins during this stretch, behind Gilgeous-Alexander. The Thunder are ninth in the West with 13 games remaining and only 1 1/2 games out of the sixth seed and a guaranteed playoff spot. Williams raising his game from starter to sub-star level over the course of that time has been the biggest catalyst for their success.

I was higher on Williams than almost anyone in the public sphere last year, ranking him as a clear top-18 player in my draft guide. But even I was not nearly high enough. Williams is clearly a top-five pick in a 2022 re-draft, a project I will undertake later in the year, just as I did last season. If he continues this hot run, and the Thunder actually make the playoffs, he will have a case to win Rookie of the Year. His per-game numbers won’t match Banchero, but Williams would be drastically more efficient, better defensively and more impactful on a more successful team. Right now, Banchero remains No. 1, but Williams is hot on his heels.

Jaden Ivey is ready to take the leap

I wrote about Ivey recently in a joint piece withThe Athletic’s James Edwards III, but I wanted to follow up with more here.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been more impressed with the level of improvement a rookie lead guard has made over the course of one season. Some rookie guards start well and continue to get better. Some go from bad to average. Others hit a rookie wall and regress. But Ivey has gone from a player who was struggling to a legitimate starting guard over the course of the season.

And he sped up that development process by slowing down.

Early on, everything looked like it was moving one million miles per hour on the court. Ivey is one of the best athletes in the NBA, but it seemed like he was trying too hard to use his speed to impose his will on the game. Over the first half of the Pistons’ season, Ivey shot 40.7 percent from the field, 31.5 percent from 3 and posted per-game averages of 14.9 points, four assists and four rebounds. He was inefficient and didn’t get to effective spots.

Coming into the NBA, the book on Ivey was that he has every athletic tool, but didn’t have a ton of experience in ball screens and didn’t yet have a consistent in-between game. He made 58.3 percent of his shots in the restricted area, but really struggled on all other two-pointer. He shot under 30 percent on his 2.5 non-restricted area paint shots per game and just 31 percent on his 1.3 midrange jumpers.

Beyond that, he wasn’t recognizing what his teammates were doing around him enough. He had a lot of drives that looked like the one below, in which he drove recklessly into big rim protectors after getting initial separation in the midrange area. Knicks big man Isaiah Hartenstein walls up and denies Ivey for what might be the easiest block of his season, all while Ivey missed sharpshooter Bojan Bogdanović open in the corner.

Over the course of the season, Ivey has begun slowing down. He’s playing on balance off two feet more. He’s much more comfortable pausing in those midrange spaces, whether to shoot or to string out the big before taking a little skip step to force them to come closer. He’s manipulating defenders more with his eyes and body. The speed is still there, and he can use it when he needs it. But instead of just going fast, he’s now going from fast to slow back to fas. His hesitation handle moves have been terrific.

On top of that, Ivey’s willingness to play off two feet more has made him a more balanced midrange shooter. Last year, his only real weapon from the midrange area was an ugly floater. However, over his last 15 games, Ivey is taking twice as many shots per game from the midrange (2.6) and making them at a 58.3 percent clip. A lot of these shots end up being right elbow jumpers, a look Ivey has become comfortable taking.

That is opening up his passing game. His newfound ability to hang out in the midrange forces defensive coverage adjustments. Perhaps the defense must tag rollers for a little bit longer and/or leave the pass to the opposite corner open for an extra split second. Sometimes, that momentary pause can open up a lob pass. Over his last 20 games, Ivey is averaging 6.3 assists per contest, demonstrating much more success finding his open teammates.

All of those improvements are on display in this clip against Orlando. Instead of just trying to drive into Magic big man Wendell Carter, Ivey takes one extra dribble toward the side of the court at the right elbow. You can see him surveying the court as passes the mesh point of the screen and crosses the 3-point line, seeing teammate Killian Hayes in the corner. Ivey picks up his dribble and throws a two-handed pass fake that gets Markelle Fultz to take an extra step into the middle of the lane. As soon as he sees Fultz jump into the lane, Ivey fires a cross-corner kick-out to Hayes.

In his last 15 games, Ivey is averaging 16.3 points, six assists and three rebounds while shooting 43 percent from the field and 36 percent from 3. He’s been much more solid on defense. The addition of James Wiseman, a rim-running big man who covers ground a bit more quickly than fellow young big man Jalen Duran, has helped Ivey on offense. Ivey had double-figure assists in three of his last six games prior to his absence because of health and safety protocols. I bet we see more of Ivey The Distributor in the last month of the season, and I couldn’t be more excited to see him thrive. He looks like a potential star in the NBA.

Mark Williams is the center of the future in Charlotte

The Charlotte Hornets have been desperate to find a big for the future to pair with point guard LaMelo Ball. Mason Plumlee was a steady veteran who helped Ball with his screening, rim-running and passing, but he had offensive limitations and serious defensive deficiencies. Second-year man Kai Jones has loads of athletic upside, but I haven’t seen much in his two years at Texas or his two years in the NBA that makes me believe he’ll reach the necessary level to anchor a playoff team. Nick Richards, in his third season at 25 years old, has shown improvement as a shot blocker and finisher this season, but is limited and still struggling with pick-and-roll defense. (He also hits restricted free agency this summer).Williams was drafted 15th overall last year to fill that void across the board. A finalist for the national defensive player of the year award at Duke, Williams profiled as the kind of elite shot blocker and rim runner a team led by Ball desperately needs.

From the moment the Hornets traded Plumlee to the Clippers on Feb. 9, Williams has looked like he belongs. In the 11 games before he hurt his thumb against Detroit, Williams was averaging 11.5 points and 9.4 rebounds per game and shooting 63 percent from the field in 26.8 minutes. His 7-foot-7 wingspan to swallow up the paint well. In those 11 games, the Hornets have actually ranked third in the league in points allowed per 100 possessions.

Williams looks enormous even by the standards of an NBA center. His catch radius on offense is also enormous. If you throw a lob pass up in his general vicinity, he’s going to come down with it and probably dunk it. The defensive numbers are a bit fuzzy in terms of quantifying Williams’ own impact, as opponents shoot about the same percentage and frequency around the rim when he’s out there, per PBPStats. But it certainly feels like opponents attack the Hornets differently when Williams is patrolling the paint. He looks like the first long-term answer the Hornets have had in the middle in a long time.

Williams suffered a right thumb sprain in a win against Detroit about a week ago, and his timeline for return is up in the air. Even with Ball out for the season with a fractured ankle, the Hornets were finally building some positive momentum. We’ll see if Williams can get back before the end of the year and help keep the Hornets’ positive vibes rolling.

Jaylin Williams does all of the little things

The People’s Choice this month, Jaylin Williams, has become arguably the most surprising starter in the league on a Thunder team contending for a postseason berth. I liked Williams a lot last year as he entered the draft, even if I had some concerns about his athleticism. Williams is not overly big or long for an NBA center, and isn’t particularly fast or able to leap high off the ground. Entering the NBA, he wasn’t all that good of a shooter, a skill that thus far has been very valuable for him. Williams is taking over two 3s per game and hitting them at a 41.6 percent clip. We’re still working with an NBA sample size of less than 100 after he shot 25.5 percent from 3 in college, so I’m a bit worried how long his long-range proficiency will last.

But even if the shooting doesn’t hold, Williams makes up for his absence of traditional tools in other ways. What he doeshave is a fast brain. He’s the kind of player Oklahoma City has prioritized in recent years: players who think the game at a high level while possessing some size, switchability and skill. The aforementioned Jalen Williams (nickname J-Dub) is more of an embodiment of those ethos, but Jaylin Williams (nickname J-Will) and fellow undersized big Jeremiah Robinson-Earl are also personifications of this Sam Presti-led front office’s ability to identify prospects.

Jaylin Williams isn’t the 7-foot rim protector who has become en vogue, nor is he quite the idealized version of a small-ball center right now. The best way to describe him is that he’s kind of always there, with a knack for being in the right place at the right time. That’s largely because he can be used in multiple ways on either end. On offense, he’s a sharp ball mover who can operate in dribble handoffs or play out on the perimeter due to his ability to find cutters.On defense, Oklahoma City coach Mark Daigneault will use him within many different ball-screen coverages every game. Sometimes, Williams is switching. Other times, he’s playing at the level of the screen. Seemingly more often than not, he’ll drop back. Plus, he’s always sharp with his off-ball rotations.

That’s seen most in a particular skill Williams has displayed throughout his career. Simply put, there might not be a better charge-taker on the planet. Williams, much to the chagrin of every SEC fanbase outside of Fayetteville, Ark., last season, led the NCAA in charges taken. A lot of scouts wondered if that ability would translate to the NBA, where bigger and faster players would be attacking the rim in larger swaths of space in the more open NBA game.

The resounding answer is, yes, it translates, and it’s hard to overemphasize how much. Despite playing only 662 minutes thus far this season entering Thursday, Williams leads the entire NBA in charges drawn with 29. To put that in context: 301 players in the NBA this season have played at least 700 minutes, and nearly 150 have played at least 1,500 minutes. Among the 347 players who have played at least 500 minutes this season, Williams averages twice as many charges taken per game as the next closest player, his teammate Kenrich Williams. He has an innate understanding of body mechanics that allows him to know when a player is going to crash into him even after they’ve already released the ball.

This is a prime example against the Lakers from a few weeks ago, where Williams manages the gap in the Thunder’s drop coverage between LA ballhandler Austin Reaves and roller Wenyen Gabriel.

This is Williams’ way of protecting the rim. Opponents are shooting 73.3 percent when he’s contesting at the rim this season, per the NBA site, a terrible number for a center. But if you add in his 29 charges taken as misses — and frankly, they’re more valuable than misses because they’re turnovers as opposed to missed shots that allow the potential for an offensive rebound — Williams is only allowing opponents to shoot the equivalent of 57.4 percent at the rim, an above-average number.

Laugh at it all you want. Consider Williams’ decision to stand there and not contest a non-basketball play, if you wish. But it’s undeniably effective.

(Top photo of Jalen Williams: Garrett Ellwood / NBAE via Getty Images)