The NBA Elite 100 was released on Wednesday, with Action Network NBA analysts Matt Moore and Brandon Anderson breaking down their 100 most impactful players for the 2024-25 NBA season.
The pair also discussed their rankings on a recent episode of BUCKETS, Action Network's NBA podcast, and debated a variety of topics, including how close their No. 2 player, Luka Doncic, was to overtaking their No. 1 player, Nikola Jokic.
Brandon Anderson: We know how good these guys are, so my question for you is how close for you was the 1 vs. 2, and what would Luka have to do to pass Jokic by the end of the season?
Matt Moore: I wrote a column after Luka won the Western Conference Finals that said that Luka would be considered the best in the world. It aged like milk, but I was very careful with how I worded the column for this reason.
The idea was that, because of what he accomplished, he would be considered the best player in the world. What I really didn't give people enough credit for was that even with how amazing Doncic was, they would all still agree that the best player in the world is Jokic.
I do think that the difference here is pretty razor-thin in that I don't think Jokic has been lucky in any regard, but I do think that he has had a fortunate stretch of outcomes. Like last season he won his third MVP and there were a lot of areas I could point to where he's a little worse than he used to be — at the rim shooting being a kind of key one. His floater was other-wordly, but his at-rim stuff wasn't as good and his 3-point shot full off.
The offense honestly is kind of stale at this point and they need to reinvigorate it, and that's on coaching, but it's also on Jokic because he's just going through the motions like a lot of players do when they get to be this good at basketball.
I think Luka is very close. Jokic called him a one-man army and that has rattled through my head over and over. It really is true. No one does more for their team than Luka. Other players, Jokic included, do better for their team, but no one does more than Luka. And if his team is able to give him more to where those outcomes are better, I think there's a real chance for us to look at the end of the season and say that Luka Doncic is the No. 1 on the Elite 100.
BA: I think the "no one does more" argument is actually why, to me, the gap is bigger than you have it. I didn't even have to think about this very hard. Jokic is in a tier of one.
It comes down to the team construct thing. Luka is a lot harder to build the right team around. It took a bunch of years before they even got a team that was good enough to reach the Finals.
We've seen versions of this team before, even, when you look at someone like James Harden. They're not the same player but they're pretty similar. And we've seen that team before that has a really, really high floor that gets great regular season numbers that can make a run. But we never saw that team win a championship with a player with that level of usage.
Jokic elevates everything around him. Luka does too, but not anywhere near that level for me. That's the difference for them. I actually had to consider Luka closer to No. 3 than I did to No. 1.
