The Best NBA Players Right Now: 2026 Player Rankings

Published July 12, 2026 · By The Basketball Fans Editors

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is the best player in the NBA right now. He just won his second straight MVP, dragged the Oklahoma City Thunder to a 67-15 record, and opened the 2026 playoffs 8-0 before San Antonio finally beat him in the Western Conference Finals. Nikola Jokić is still the most statistically absurd player alive. Victor Wembanyama, at 22, might already be better than both of them in three years. This list ranks the top of the league as it actually stood at the end of the 2025-26 season, not as it stood in April before anyone had played a playoff game that mattered.

Four things decide the order: 2025-26 regular-season production, two-way impact (not just scoring), how a guy actually performed once the games got hard in the spring, and where the catch-all advanced metrics (BPM, EPM, RAPTOR) land him relative to the field. Awards matter, but they’re a lagging indicator. A guy can win MVP in May and get exposed in June. That happened this year, sort of, and it’s the first thing worth settling.

Jokić or SGA: who’s actually number one

Depends which of the four criteria you weight heaviest. By regular-season efficiency, nobody touches Jokić: 28.5 points, 12.5 rebounds, 9.6 assists on 60.2/41.8/81.0 shooting is a stat line that doesn’t have a real historical comp at that usage rate. By hardware and team success, it’s SGA, in a landslide, 96 of 100 first-place MVP votes and the best record in basketball. By playoff results, neither of them, technically. SGA’s Thunder went 8-0 through two rounds and then lost the Western Conference Finals to Wembanyama’s Spurs. Jokić’s Nuggets didn’t make the conference finals at all. So if you’re building this list purely off “who actually won when it counted this spring,” you end up crowning a 22-year-old who didn’t even make the Finals as a favorite. Basketball rankings don’t work that cleanly, and they shouldn’t. SGA gets the top spot because he had the best regular season of the three by results, the best two-way profile of the three (Oklahoma City’s defense was historically good with him at the point of attack), and the gap between him and the field over 82 games is bigger than the gap San Antonio opened up over six games in May. Jokić is 1B. Wembanyama is the guy you can’t rule out having the best case in twelve months.

1. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander

32.0 points, 6.4 assists, 5.9 rebounds, 1.7 steals a night on 53.5/39.4/91.0 shooting splits, for a team that finished 67-15. That’s the full case laid out here, and none of it changed once the playoffs started. Oklahoma City swept Phoenix, swept the Lakers, and went into the Western Conference Finals 8-0 before San Antonio finally slowed them down. Every advanced model, BPM, EPM, RAPM, LEBRON, RAPTOR, had him first in the league during the regular season, and his on-off net rating split (plus-12.8 with him on the floor, plus-0.4 without) was the widest gap of any player in the NBA. Back-to-back MVPs at 27 puts him alongside Jordan, Bird, Magic, and Kareem on the short list of players who’ve done it in that stretch of their prime. He’s the best player alive right now because there isn’t a category on this list where he ranks worse than second.

2. Nikola Jokić

Jokić’s 2025-26 season, 28.5 points, 12.5 rebounds, 9.6 assists, 1.4 steals on 60/42/81 shooting, is the kind of statistical outlier that would be the headline of any other season in league history. He’s the only player ever to sustain a 25-12-9 line across more than 600 regular-season games, and he did it again this year at a higher efficiency than most of his three MVP seasons. He has three MVPs and a championship already, which means the case for him at number one isn’t speculative, it’s a case that’s already won before. What kept Denver from a deeper 2026 playoff run wasn’t him. It rarely is.

3. Victor Wembanyama

Twenty-five and a half points, 11 rebounds, 4 assists, 3.7 blocks, 1.4 steals, on 49.5 percent shooting including 35.7 percent from three, as the best defensive player alive at 22 years old. That’s the regular season. Then he took an eighth-seed-caliber roster to the NBA Finals, sweeping Portland in round one, coming back from a 1-0 series hole against Minnesota in round two, and eliminating Gilgeous-Alexander’s 67-win Thunder in the Western Conference Finals. He had 31 points and 12 rebounds in a Finals loss to New York while shooting over the top of every double-team the Knicks threw at him. No player this size has ever moved like this or shot like this. The DPOY vote isn’t close. The only reason he isn’t higher on this list is a full regular season of volume and results; give him one more year of both and this argument is over.

4. Giannis Antetokounmpo

Giannis put up 27.9 points, 11.1 rebounds, 6.2 assists, and 1.2 blocks in 32.7 minutes a night in his age-31 season, numbers that would headline anyone else’s résumé and barely registered nationally because his split from Milwaukee ate every headline instead. He triggered a league investigation into how the Bucks handled a late-season shutdown, made clear he wanted out, and by the June 23 draft, Miami had emerged as the favorite to land him in a package built around Tyler Herro and multiple first-round picks. Whatever jersey he’s wearing when this list gets updated next, the production hasn’t slipped an inch: two MVPs, a Finals MVP, four Defensive Player of the Year awards, and a body that, at 31, still moves like it’s 25. Rank him on talent and two-way impact alone and he’s a top-three player in the world. He’s fourth here because a fractured locker room and a franchise-altering trade are, whether it’s fair or not, part of what “right now” means.

5. Luka Dončić

32.7 points, 9.4 assists, 8.1 rebounds on 47.5/36.6/79.0 shooting, second in the league in scoring behind only Gilgeous-Alexander, in his first full season as a Los Angeles Laker. That’s not a decline from the Dallas years. It’s arguably the most efficient stretch of his career, paired for the first time with a shot-creator who doesn’t need the ball in his hands (LeBron James) instead of being the only engine on the roster. The Lakers were swept out of the second round by Oklahoma City, and the Lakers’ 22nd-ranked defense is the real reason, not anything Dončić did or didn’t do offensively. He’s finished top-three in MVP voting four times without winning it. The résumé is already a top-ten peak season away from needing no qualifiers at all.

6. Jaylen Brown

Brown averaged 26.8 points, 6.0 rebounds, and 4.5 assists for a Boston Celtics team that went 56-26, the second-best record in the East, while Jayson Tatum missed the first 59 games rehabbing a ruptured Achilles. Boston’s record without Tatum, 50-22, is one of the best marks in the league by any team missing its best player for that long, and Brown is the reason. He’s a four-time All-Star, the 2024 Finals MVP, and the guy who took the “best player on a top-two conference team” argument, which usually stays theoretical, and made it concrete for five months. He’s never finished top-three in regular-season MVP voting. This is the year that should have changed, and mostly didn’t, because voters reward the guy with the gaudier ceiling stat, not the guy who kept a contender’s lights on.

7. Anthony Edwards

Edwards is 24 now, in his fifth NBA season, and the gap between “clearly great” and “best player alive” is closing faster than almost anyone else’s on this list. His shot profile keeps getting harder to defend every year: the pull-up three off a live dribble, from further out, at higher volume, with a catch-and-shoot percentage that’s improved in each of his five seasons. He’s an above-average, engaged defender who Minnesota uses on the opponent’s best perimeter creator in crunch time, not just a scorer who tolerates defense. Two conference finals runs before turning 23 (2024 past Denver, ended by Dallas) put him ahead of schedule for a superstar timeline most guys don’t hit until 27 or 28. The Timberwolves are built to win now. He hasn’t been to a Finals yet. That’s the only thing keeping him out of the top five.

8. Stephen Curry

Curry is still, in his late 30s, the most-imitated jumper in basketball, and the reason every modern offense at every level of the sport is built around movement shooting instead of post touches. Four championships, two MVPs including the only unanimous vote in league history, and a career three-point total nobody else is within shouting distance of. The résumé has been recited often enough that it undersells the actual value, which is that opposing coaching staffs still have to design entire defensive schemes around where he is on the floor, empty-handed, forty feet from the rim. He’s not the best player in the league anymore. He’s still good enough that leaving him off a top-ten list would be an argument nobody could defend with a straight face.

9. Kevin Durant

Durant, at 37, is in his first full season with the Houston Rockets after the June 2025 trade that was, by transaction size, the largest in NBA history. Two championships, two Finals MVPs, an MVP, four scoring titles, and he’s still, per every efficiency model that exists, one of the hardest players in the league to guard one-on-one at any spot on the floor. The question with Durant has never really been talent. It’s mileage: eighteen NBA seasons, an Achilles tear, and a body that’s asked to do more shot-creation for a new team than it’s had to in years. He’s answering it fine so far. The full career arc is here.

10. Kawhi Leonard

Two-time Finals MVP, two-time Defensive Player of the Year, and when healthy, still one of the two or three best two-way wings alive; he scored 55 on Detroit in December 2025 to prove it. “When healthy” is doing real work in that sentence. The quad injury that broke his relationship with Gregg Popovich in San Antonio never fully went away, and the LA Clippers have spent the last several seasons managing his minutes like a chronic condition rather than an exception. On a per-minute basis he’s a top-five player in the league. Across a full season, the minutes he actually plays keep him outside the top eight. His full story, including the Compton and Popovich chapters, is worth reading regardless of where you land on the ranking.

11. Jayson Tatum

Tatum tore his right Achilles in Game 4 of the 2025 Eastern Conference Semifinals against New York, missed the rest of that postseason, then missed the first 59 games of 2025-26 rehabbing it. He came back on March 6, 2026, against Dallas, at 27 years old, and posted 15 points, 12 rebounds, and 7 assists in his first game. He’s on this list on reputation and a small, promising sample rather than a full season, and that’s an honest way to rank a six-time All-Star, five-time All-NBA selection, and the leading scorer of a championship team, coming off the single injury that most reliably ends a wing’s explosiveness. What he looks like across a full healthy 2026-27 season is the single biggest swing variable at the top of next year’s version of this list.

12. Joel Embiid

Embiid is here with an asterisk the size of his 2022-23 MVP trophy. Philadelphia has had him on a hard 20-minutes-a-game restriction with no back-to-backs for the entire 2025-26 season, and across 38 games under that plan he averaged 18.6 points, well below his career norms, on a per-36-minute basis still comparable to any center in the league. The talent hasn’t gone anywhere; the availability has. He’s the most technically skilled big man of the post-Shaq era and the active player whose career has been shaped by injury more than any other superstar of his generation. The 76ers finished as a play-in team in 2025-26. Until his body allows a full season, that’s the ceiling, no matter how good the 20 minutes look.

Just missed

James Harden, at 36, was traded from the Clippers to Cleveland in February 2026 for Darius Garland and a second-round pick, a signal about where his value sits more than his production, which is still real. Ja Morant had his cleanest, most controlled season yet, taking Memphis to a 46-36 record and the sixth seed in the West without the reckless stretches that used to cost him. Damian Lillard is still rehabbing the Achilles he ruptured in Milwaukee’s 2025 first-round series against Indiana and isn’t expected back on the floor until 2026-27. Cooper Flagg, the No. 1 pick, isn’t a top-15 player yet and won’t be this year, but he’s the name to check on this list first next season.

The refresh trigger

A list like this is only as good as its last update. SGA could get hurt in October. Wembanyama could win MVP outright next spring and blow past everyone above him. Giannis could be wearing a completely different jersey by the time you’re reading this. We rebuild this ranking after each postseason, once a full season plus a real playoff sample actually exists to judge, not on a fixed clock. Check the dateline at the top before you argue about it in the comments.

Sources

• Basketball-Reference: 2025-26 NBA player per-game stats
• NBA.com/stats: advanced player tracking, 2025-26 season
• NBA.com Kia MVP ladder, April 17, 2026 edition.
• Basketball-Reference: 2026 NBA Playoffs Summary
• NBA.com, recap of the Knicks’ 2026 NBA championship over San Antonio.
• ESPN, 2026 NBA Awards coverage.