 What's the word, y'all? Who are the most underrated players in the NBA? I get your second to give your answer in the comment section, but that's what we talking about today. Cause I get asked this question so many times. When you meet somebody for the first time and you tell them what you do for a living and I tell them this, they ask like, oh, who going to championship this year? That's the first question. And the second question is who is underrated? It's not who's the MVP, who's the best player in the league. For some reason, everybody wants to know who's underrated. And boy, I just don't never, I never really know how to tackle that question because I think it's a loaded question. Listen, my job is to talk hoops. So I'm always overthinking NBA questions. I could easily say Jada McDaniels and just leave it at that. I always overthink these things. So I'm going to get some help. After I tell you these hats, these new enjoy basketball hats are on sale right now. The link is in the description. It is very limited as all enjoy basketball jobs are. So you do not want to miss out. It is for the basketball enthusiasts enjoy. I've been rocking this one in the black one in the videos for a long time now. A lot of y'all been asking when it drop is, the drop is right now. So hit the link in the description before it sells out. So the athletic asked 100 NBA players, which is about a third of active NBA players to answer a bunch of questions. And one of the questions was this one, who is underrated? It's always interesting to see how many people voted considering how many tallies went out, right? Who was the MVP? A hundred people ended up answering best defender. You get 98 people answering 104 on who they would start their franchise with from scratch. Who's overrated? Half of those people said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're not about to get an answer out of me. Even though this is anonymous, you're not going to get an answer out of me. A lot of those people said Trey Young, which is a conversation for another day, I guess. But then you get to underrated and majority of the people did get they vote in and the bulk of like an individual player is Drew Holliday. You listen to any player podcast there is. When this question is asked, their answer is Drew Holliday. And for good reason, Drew Holliday is one of the best perimeter players, perimeter defenders in all of basketball and the offensive game may not match that, but it is pretty close. And you can see why. I mean, he made the All-Star game this year. But this was this season, right? This is this year. You also get people like Che Guevara, Alexander, who made his first all-in-the-18 and Kil Bridges, who was really good second half of the season. These are also like Damian Lillard, even though he's one of the best players in league. They say, uh-uh, y'all still not giving them enough respect. And I like that. This is from 2023. The same exact poll went out in 2019 and people still said Drew Holliday was the most overrated. So I am saying right now, Drew Holliday cannot be the most underrated for four years in the row, because that just means he's regularly rated. You know what I'm saying? If everybody recognizes how good he is, he's not underrated. Yes, because you could tackle a couple of ways, right? When you think about underrated, you could say, hey, majority of the general public don't really understand how good this player really is. That's one way to tackle it. And the second way is, hey, I know y'all watching and I know you see him doing this thing, but you're not getting a full grasp. But if it's been four years and people are still saying Drew, it's gotta be a new answer somewhere in there eventually, right? Like, bro, he's the best defender and he's the most underrated? Like, that's insane. Anyway, all of this stems from this one, Reddit post from R-Pars18, and he asks who's the most underrated player of all. He say he kinda wanna say Trey Young, but I'm interested to see what others consider underrated. And it's funny because the athletic poll had the players think that Trey Young is overrated. This guy's thinking that Trey Young is underrated. And I kinda understand what he's coming from. It gets to the point where you become so considered overrated that you eventually become underrated. Like, Trey Young has put up some ridiculous stats of not even really being, he wasn't even really in conversations for an all-star game last season. I was there at that time. I made a valid. Trey Young did not even cross the, well, he crossed the line, but he didn't make the official valid, even though he was averaging, what, 25 and 10? I understand his officially tanked last season compared to the others. But still, a lot of people believe that Trey Young is not like that when in reality, he probably is, but I mean, only time will tell. That one, a voted thing is Wendell Carter, pretty much a jack-of-all-trades type of player. And this is something I said recently, best contract in the league, so it's funny to see other people agreeing. Because it's a four-year, four-year $50 million feels like pennies, pennies the way the NBA money is right now. But I understand this. I completely understand this. I've said this for some time. I mean, from the time he was in Chicago, I told the world, like, Wendell Carter's actually nice. You might look at his box score and say, oh, 13 and eight, that ain't really, we are at those kinda numbers, but he does a little bit of everything. And I think the Orlando Magic have a decent amount of players that kinda could be in the underrated tier because they do a little bit of everything. The real question of Wendell Carter's, will he become excellent at one of those things that he can really attach himself to? Because if he becomes an excellent rebounder or an excellent shot blocker or excellent IQ, or excellent mid-range jumpshooter, whatever it may be, if he can take one skew and become excellent with everything else because being a pretty good, I see what a future is. The question is, will Wendell Carter, will he ever turn into, like I always said, when he was in Chicago, he could be like Al Horford, a couple of old-time All-Star, and then just a quality, quality, really high-level starter in the league for a long time. And if his career could be Al Horford, a lot of people are really, really happy. Al Horford, one of those dudes that do a little bit of everything is really good at a lot of different things. Even this year, he shot 44% from three, and aged like 37. I can see Wendell Carter being extremely underrated because I believe that a lot of people have not watched Wendell Carter. He has been on tanking teams when he was here in Chicago. Then he went to Orlando and he was the package piece or the main attraction and a trade where the team he went to was selling. So it hasn't been like high-intensity, high-stakes basketball for Wendell Carter yet in his career. And I feel like once he gets to that moment, whether it be a playing game or a playoff series, people realize, oh no, Wendell Carter is actually really, really nice. And he's a really, really smart defender. I'm really high on Devava Sale. I try to come into these videos and be as honest as possible. Devava Sale slash the San Antonio Spurs, they're not a team I've watched a ton over the last season. Even though I felt like I was always watching when they was doing some special kind of night where they had XNBA players from their organization be on the call with the normal announcers and I really liked that. It's also a plug alert. There is also a docu-series here on YouTube from the official San Antonio Spurs YouTube account that goes through the entire history and I bench-watched all of that in one day. It's great, by the way. All that being said, I have not watched a ton of Devava Sale to even have a real, real opinion of him. This is the season where I dive in because I'm undoubtedly watching because Wendell is there and I feel the same way about Malachi Brannum and so on and so forth. So I can't have an opinion on this one just yet. This is the guy I mentioned, Jada McDaniels, Zulu's really a good defender. I think he deserved to be all defensive this season but he wasn't. It seems like he's on the nods repath of development where he creases handles and other offensive aspects each off season. Jada McDaniels falls into one of my favorite archetypes of players that like, man, he got that one side of the ball down pack. Now watch, he starts to add a little bit here and a little bit here and a little bit here and there, boom, he's great. I mean, great, relatively, relatively great. I don't know if he's ever gonna be an all-star but I'm not gonna cap the man's potential by myself. I think I started to really like that archetype because of Jimmy Butler watching him in Chicago where like when he was drafted even though he played almost no minutes per game, you saw how much he cared defensively. It was like, man, if he can ever put the ball on the floor then you learn how to do that. If he can ever make a jump shot then you learn how to do that as long as it's within the arc, even to this day. And he just turned into something that nobody expected him to be at the 30th overall pick. That's why I really liked the archetype of player. Now it doesn't come around that often because I'll be honest with you, the guy that I thought was gonna do something to him, not to be Jimmy Butler, but I mean like he got that one side of the ball and if he can become average offensively he's gonna be super quality player. It was Matisse Stiball. Matisse Stiball came to the league. If you remember my draft, I'm like, man, oh, they just got a steal right there. And he made off defensive teams, but he never was able to put the offensive side together. At least yet, I'm not counting them out either. This guy makes a good point though. I think Jaden is pretty well appreciated by media serious NBA heads. I feel like, yeah, if you've been watching any Minnesota Timbers of the last season, you're aware of Jaden McDaniels. It's just a matter of getting people to watch. They made the playoffs last season. He broke his hand because he punched a wall. So like as far as the general public though, they may not know much about Jaden, but the die hard NBA fans, the serious NBA heads definitely know. Point and Grimes and Trade Murphy are really, really good picks. And actually I might take back, sorry Jaden, I might take back my Jaden McDaniels to give the Trade Murphy one. I might have to. This is what I said earlier about the Orlando Magic. They have a couple different people. Mark Hill has been bouncing back strong, but Mark Hill at this point, and I don't mean on the national stage, like the athletic polls and stuff. I feel like NBA fans have been saying that Mark Hill has been underrated for a few years now. And he's been good, do not get me wrong. You definitely saw the difference between when he did play versus when he did play last season, how bad your Orlando Magic looked in the first part of the season when he was injured. And then he came back and like, oh snap, this is like a real NBA team. His impact is there. But I fall victim to it as well. I feel like every year over the last couple of years when we do our preseason most improved player candidates to always have Mark Hill there because I'm hoping that that first overall pick version of him is still in there. And every single year he shows you that like, even if he's not first overall pick, he's gonna be a damn good NBA player. But like I still like, oh, he gonna take that jump. He gonna take that jump. This might be my last year of expecting Mark Hill to take the jump. Because honestly, he doesn't necessarily need to for the online event. Nah, it does help a ton if he does take that jump. But between Paolo and Frans, those two dudes look like studs. We maybe not need Mark Hill folks to be an all-star caliber player to be really good. I've been seeing a lot of Chris Stapps for Zingas. And I think that with him playing on a contending team, a lot of people are gonna realize how good he is. It's just a matter of can he get healthy. Aaron Gordon falls into this. But the fact that Aaron Gordon just did what he did on the NBA final scale, I'm gonna say he's no longer underrated because everybody saw what he did, you know what I'm saying? But, I mean, I guess he could still be. Those are just a few. But as you notice, there wasn't a ton of already all-star level players that were mentioned. And I think that you could potentially still be an all-star and still be underrated, you know? But I mean, let me know in the comment section. Who's the most underrated player in the ball? And we'll be back soon. Peace. Hit the link, hit the link. Get your hat man, don't miss out, get your hat.