Who Is the NBA’s Most Underrated Player (And Is It Herb Jones)?

Let's look at which players have flown under the radar the most this season.

Herbert Jones of the New Orleans Pelicans swoops to the net. (Carmen Mandato/Getty Images)

I’ll admit that the origin of this post is a little different from the norm. Usually, I will start with a question and then focus things around the player or team that showed up as the answer. But in this case, I started with the answer, and it gave me more questions.

I was poking around a Google Sheet that I made for my former Messenger colleague Mike Charles, which tracks the NBA teams and players who have been the hottest over the previous couple of weeks. The best players by Estimated RAPTOR coming out of the All-Star break are just about who you’d expect, particularly if you adjust for the stats’ (understandable) love of Derrick White:

Aside from Malik Beasley, who’s been associated with some incredible team play while on the court, the name that really popped to me was Herb Jones of the Pelicans. I know he’s continued his ascent as a player this year, reaching career highs in usage, scoring and various other metrics, while the Pelicans challenge for a Top-4 seed in the West. But for the average fan, Jones is relatively underappreciated.

In his third NBA season, Jones has actually been New Orleans’ leading player by WAR this year, with his 4.9 mark edging out Brandon Ingram (4.8), Zion Williamson (4.2) and sitting well clear of CJ McCollum (3.2) — all far bigger stars in the NBA universe. Part of that is because the Pels’ lineups work so much better with Jones on the floor, and part is because Jones does a little bit of everything at both ends of the court while making very few mistakes. He’s the quintessential well-rounded guy who does the “little things” that adjusted plus/minus style stats have always tended to love.

With that in mind, I set out to prove that Jones was the most underrated player in the league… or at least see if he had a case. As a proxy for popularity or fan awareness, I used the NBA’s All-Star fan voting results, and broke down the best WAR (per 82 team games) players this year — as of Feb. 28 — by each tier of fan (non-) support:

(Shoutout to all the old-school FiveThirtyEight fans who recognize this kind of table format, by the way!)¹

Among players with under a million fan votes (a category that included all but 23 stars), White is the answer to our “most underrated” question. But as the starting SG for the best team in the league, I’m not sure he really flies under the radar enough for our purposes.

Digging deeper, the best player with under 500k votes is DeMar DeRozan, a paragon of consistent production in his 14th NBA season. But DeRozan has been an All-Star before, as recently as last season, so he may just be underappreciated for how good he still is on a Chicago team that otherwise can’t decide whether it wants to sneak into the playoffs or not. A similar story could be told about Mike Conley, the best player with fewer than 200k (or 100k) votes; Conley, at age 36, is still a really effective and valuable player, and he even plays for one of the league’s better teams in Minnesota. He’s been an All-Star before — somehow only once, which seems wrong — and his low vote count probably just boils down to being overshadowed by teammates on a small-market team, plus people forgetting how good he is.

Which brings us to Mr. Herb Jones. He edges out Utah’s Collin Sexton — another really underrated player this season — as the best WAR producer under 50,000 All-Star votes.

Case closed for Jones, right?

Well, maybe. He certainly belongs near the top of any underrated NBA players list. But even he was able to marshal a shade over 20,000 votes. The best player (by far) under that threshold, with his name on a mere 9,950 ballots, is Cleveland’s Max Strus. You’d think a starter for an NBA Finals team — last year’s Miami Heat — would earn more attention across the league. And maybe Strus will after shots like his crazy ¾-court game-winner against Dallas on Tuesday night.

But for now, both he and Jones have a good case as the most underrated player in the league this season, along with a few other names on the table above. So what do you think? Who is the NBA’s biggest unsung star? Leave a comment below.

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Filed under: NBA

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