Next year’s NBA Top 100 players: Lonzo Ball, Quentin Grimes, Deandre Ayton among 10 players on the verge

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Every year, CBS Sports ranks the top 100 players in the NBA, and every year, we inevitably miss some of the most important players of the season that follows. Take last year’s list for the 2024-25 season. Most Improved Player Dyson Daniels? Unranked. Breakout Rockets star Amen Thompson? Unranked. Ivica Zubac made a late run at an All-NBA selection. He did not, however, make our list of the 100 best players in the sport.

Inevitably, we end up with a bit of egg on our faces. We correct that a year later, of course, but the nature of the exercise practically necessitates mistakes. We can’t see the future even if the list is meant to look towards it. Players often make the list based on expected future performance, but if we knew for certain which players were set to improve, well, teams would probably try to hire us because they don’t know for sure either. A lot of the fun of the beginning of the season is seeing which players break out unexpectedly.

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So today, we’re going to try to take a stab at figuring that out. The following 10 players did not make our top 100 ranking. But for one reason or another, they are players who could make us look foolish for excluding them, and then ultimately make next year’s list as an apology. Of course, there are some pretty obvious candidates for a list like this, so to make it more interesting, we’re going to exclude a few people. For starters, no 2025 rookies are eligible here. We haven’t even seen them play. We’re also barring No. 1 picks in the first five years of their careers (sorry Zaccharie Risacher) and Rookie of the Year winners (so long Stephon Castle). There’s no fun in predicting when players like that will make a leap.

No, we’re looking for slightly deeper cuts here. This list includes just one top-five pick on a rookie contract, and he has played less than 1,000 NBA minutes. Meanwhile, we have two undrafted free agents, two veterans on their fourth NBA teams and another on his third, and a late first-round pick with less than 400 minutes to his name. So here are 10 players, some of whom have obvious paths, others who’d be coming out of nowhere, who could crack next year’s top 100 list.

Grimes very easily could have made this year’s list. He averaged almost 22 points per game as a 76er … but he did it as a 76er, which meant he did it for the most aggressive tankers of last season. Were those empty calories? Or signs of true growth? We’ll find out this season as Grimes attempts to fit into a healthier and hopefully more competitive Philadelphia team than the one he played for last season. Considering his experience as a 3-and-D wing in New York, though, he should be perfectly capable of sliding into the background for the Sixers. Combine the role player skills from his Knicks years and the high-level scoring from March and April, and you have a no-brainer top 100 player.

Are we cheating a little bit by excluding the No. 1 pick in 2024 but accepting the No. 3 pick? Maybe, but Zaccharie Risacher played real minutes last season. Sheppard didn’t. Now, with Fred VanVleet out, he’ll have to. He’s fortunately in an ideal situation for his skill set. The Rockets can cover for his size issue on defense and likely won’t ask him to handle the ball too much. But they badly need his shooting, and he should be able to get good looks in an offense led by Kevin Durant and Alperen Sengun. Elite shooting can get a player onto the top 100. Payton Pritchard is the obvious analogue. We don’t know if Sheppard is ready for that yet, but the Rockets wouldn’t have taken him No. 3 if they didn’t think he could get there.

Everything is lining up for Sharpe this season. He’s been a training camp standout by all accounts. He has Jrue Holiday and Damian Lillard in the building as mentors. Portland has seemingly solved its defense. What it needs is a primary scorer on offense, and with Scoot Henderson out early in the season, Sharpe won’t even have competition from another high lottery pick. This is his moment to prove that he can be a cornerstone player. He has the athletic gifts. If he can make 3s consistently and improve his decision-making, he’s an obvious top 100 candidate for next season and a possible Most Improved Player this year.

At his peak in 2021, Deandre Ayton ranked 51st on our top 100 list. We weren’t abnormally high on him either. The Pacers gave him a max offer sheet, and then the Suns matched it. He has the tools to be a high-level starting center. Lately, he hasn’t had the motivation. But how many times have we seen a down-on-his-luck veteran join a LeBron James team and suddenly rediscover his old magic? Is Ayton really that different from 2020 Dwight Howard? He’s in an ideal position now. Between James, Austin Reaves and Luka Dončić, he’s never had more playmaking around him. If that doesn’t motivate him to play harder and do the dirty work, nothing will. But if we get the 2021 version of him in a contract year? It’s not hard to imagine him making it back onto the list next year.

Matas Buzelis flashed just about every important skill at some point last season. His handle needs work, but it was impressive for a rookie of his size. He was a league-average shooter last year on reasonable volume, which few saw coming, and he was a surprisingly capable defensive playmaker already. But you’re not here for that stuff. You’re here for the 6-10 dude with insane hops throwing down monster jams. The other stuff is what he needs to be a well-rounded NBA player. The hope is that he continues to grow as a ball-handler, that his shooting growth continues. If that happens, he has star potential. But that stuff takes time. What we’ll absolutely see this season is this athletic giant running the floor and owning highlight reels on one of the league’s fastest teams. He’s already a nerd favorite. He’ll be a social media darling before long as well.

Our top 100, especially the bottom half, is stuffed full of 3-and-D role players. Nickeil Alexander-Walker has never been a full-time starter and he snuck into the final slot. Ellis hasn’t had the widespread exposure that Alexander-Walker did on a contending Timberwolves team because he’s been stuck on the Kings, but he’s an absolutely ferocious point-of-attack defender who’s made just under 43% of his 3s in his three NBA seasons. If he played for a normal team, he’d have made the list by now. If he keeps this up, not even the Kings will be able to hold him off from future editions.

Last year gave fans a newfound appreciation for a very specific sort of role player: those who can’t play significant minutes for stylistic and durability-related reasons but absolutely own the minutes they do play. Think of Steven Adams in Houston last year, or Ty Jerome in Cleveland. T.J. McConnell almost won Indiana a championship in 18-minute increments. You could make credible arguments for any of them making the list under the logic that they are absolutely among the best 100 players in the NBA on a per-minute basis. The one I’ll call attention to this season is Lonzo Ball, who is a match made in heaven for a Cleveland team that badly needed more transition creativity and on-ball defense. If Ball can give the Cavaliers 20 good minutes per night, the specific things he’ll bring are so valuable that there will be a strong argument to get him back into the top 100 mix.

A lot of the ingredients we’ve touched on for other players apply here. Newfound opportunity? Check. Without Tyrese Haliburton, someone needs to handle the ball more in Indiana. Contract year? Check. A good year could make Mathurin a lot of money. Draft pedigree? Check. Mathurin was a No. 6 pick, and even if he runs hot and cold, the playoffs showed just how valuable he can be when he’s hot. If you can score in the mid-20s against Oklahoma City’s historic defense multiple times in the Finals, there’s a very valuable player hidden in there somewhere. Now, with the Pacers going through a gap year, we’ll see if Mathurin can discover that form on a more permanent basis.

I promised you deep cuts, didn’t I? Shannon barely played last year… but Minnesota trusted him enough to give him real minutes in the Western Conference finals. Alexander-Walker is gone and someone has to take on his bench role, but with Mike Conley aging fast, there’s also going to be a juicy playmaking opportunity available for Minnesota’s young players if they can seize it. Rob Dillingham, as the higher draft pick, would be the obvious suspect. He’s younger and has more theoretical upside. But Shannon is immediately playable on offense and was surprisingly stout defensively for a low-minutes rookie. If you can score consistently without taking other significant skills off the table, you can be a very valuable player pretty quickly. That’s the argument here. Shannon will have a bigger role this season to showcase the rest of his game, and there were signs last year that were pretty promising.

The longest of our long shots, and I do mean that literally, as Huff has a 7-5 wingspan. There is a gaping vacuum at center in Indiana, and their system relies on having a big man who can shoot. Huff was over 40% last season on 12.4 attempts per 100 possessions. He’s a strong shot-blocker as well, and he’s quite the showman as a dunker. Is he a likely top-100 player? Absolutely not. Come on, he’s barely been a rotation player. But you just know someone is emerging out of nowhere in Indiana this season. Rick Carlisle has an 82-game blank slate to work with, and Huff offers the cheapest possible replication of Myles Turner‘s skill set. The Pacers will give him every chance to succeed. He’s under contract for essentially the minimum through 2028, so if he is a diamond in the rough, the Pacers will have him for the price of a ring pop for the foreseeable future.

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