2001-Born Basketball Age Ranking Notes, featuring Franz Wagner, Anthony Edwards, and LaMelo Ball

A strong sample of All-Star, All-NBA, and starter-level talent was born in 2001; how do their careers stack up so far, and whose career…

2001-Born Basketball Age Ranking Notes, featuring Franz Wagner, Anthony Edwards, and LaMelo Ball

A strong sample of All-Star, All-NBA, and starter-level talent was born in 2001; how do their careers stack up so far, and whose career projection is the strongest?

A recent thought experiment left me especially stumped: who would I include in my personal off-court basketball Mount Rushmore? Deciphering which non-players have molded my evaluation and teambuilding beliefs without an immediate bias to the gamefied ‘luck’ of sustained winning can be difficult, and left names like Red Auerbach (uncompetitive player acquisition landscape) and Sam Presti (volume shooter, still a GOAT but not in as replicable a way as I’d prefer for an ‘idol’) off my list.

Though I believe his recent work on the margins has been poor, Darryl Morey’s early work birthed a lot of the members in the public and private spaces today; even then, Harden’s teammate help always lagged behind the West’s stalwarts and created irresponsibly large burdens on Harden where guard and wing help had no chance to contribute. Like what was 37-year-old Jason Terry doing as Harden’s fourth-most frequent teammate in his 2015 and 2016 seasons? I’m still working through my complete four-man list, but two answers came much easier. Mike D’Antoni’s optimization of player roles, attack methods, and lineup creativity has stuck with me. It saddens me deeply that his coaching tree, consisting of Alvin Gentry, Kenny Atkinson, his brother Dan, and his former player Steve Nash, never found the vast opportunity or success that the staffs of less groundbreaking coaches have.

My next answer comes just as easily: Mike Gribanov. The godfather of Draft Twitter and an admitted inspiration to nearly every one of my peers, Grib’s evaluative hitlist is seemingly endless, with countless early praises of grassroots, NCAA, and NBA late bloomers found from searching his tweet history. Among the many other influences he’s had on the processes of Draft Twitter, the most actionable move for an evaluator with some time on their hands is to forgo ranking players solely by their high school or draft classes and instead use a more standardized method to evaluate players who are closer in career development.

Over the past four years, he has continued to rank, update, and follow up on the top 50-or-so best players born in a certain year, and I’ve been lucky enough to follow and learn from his process for most of that time. The Twitter space that we’ve both grown the vast majority of our following from is most interested in the NBA Draft, functioning as the central release valve for the best players. With this, many blind spots can be developed. Any player whose path to the league doesn’t go from the top of HS leaderboards to a blueblood university to an NBA franchise that presents them with minutes and touches early can be easily dismissed, only to rise again once in a more beneficial situation. Age ranks allow one to be consistently updated on players relative to their closest peers. I have published rankings on players born in 2002, 2003, and 2004 up to this point, with my 2001 rankings being the first posted alongside extended notes. I doubt I’ll continue this long-form method for all of my future rankings, but I hope to do as many as time and focus allow. While continuing linearly to 2005 is a more pertinent matter with the 2026 NBA Draft in about a month, the players born in 2001 are currently telling the story of the league, and my recent thoughts on them have changed more substantially than the 2005 cohort.

These rankings attempt to project which players will provide the most motivation to winning games, as independent of their teammate help as reasonably possible, over their multi-season peak, not where I would have ranked them as prospects or where they’d rank currently, though both of these factors are important in projection.

Wagner’s top slot ahead of All-Stars, All-NBA recipients, and NBA Champions surely has Stathead subscribers reading and wiggling their toes in excitement, as real fans head to the replies of the accompanying Twitter post.

I’ve long maintained that Wagner and Edwards were important figureheads in the league’s hierarchy, and their play since the post below has validated my claims and expectations.

The subtext of the post is that I prefer Manu’s per-minute impact across his career to Kobe’s, and prefer Franz’s to Ant’s today. As Edwards has taken on a heavier offensive burden, his once-intriguing defensive playmaking (positive rSTOP%, 3.4 deflections per 100 possessions in his 2022+2023 seasons) has waned. In fact, a lot of traits that made Edwards such an interesting prototype two-way shooting guard have dwindled or regressed. Never an impressive passer, his average shot distance was 14.3 ft from the basket through his first four seasons and has increased to 16.3 ft over his last two.

While shooting and making more threes is an undoubted win for Edwards in the long-term, that this hasn’t made him a more potent Moreyball scorer is scary. How will he ever take a playmaking leap while failing to fully collapse defenses by getting all the way to the rim? The bad outcome of intentionally workshopping his short midrange game throughout the regular season from a player who cannot generate rim assists is a player whose only means of carrying an elite offense is to make every single shot or have their ‘good’ misses end up as OREBs. As extreme a playstyle as this is, it’s one I’ve alluded to and glorified before: this is the Josh Hubbard method!!

Unfortunately, Edwards currently turns the ball over way too much for this to work, both as a playmaker and as a scorer. He’s also led extremely mediocre offenses throughout his career (a +1 offense over nearly 10,000 career minutes without DiVincenzo on the floor is pretty abysmal for an offensive engine). At his peak, I am hopeful that his defensive playmaking will return, and improved lineup construction will better suit his game. The difference between him being second or fifth in my rankings is reliant on confidence intervals more than thinking he’s particularly great. Ball has played 10,000 fewer possessions than Edwards, and his consistency and progress as a shooter have been substantial enough to keep him ahead of the players below.

Wagner’s outlook is pretty pristine, though. Never turning the ball over on solid assist volume, consistently being a positive to all three defensive factors (dTS, dTOV, dREB), and being an immaculate two-point shotmaker at 6'10 is the baseline to being the two-way star of his generation.

The best part about being a fan of his is simply waiting for his immaculate touch to materialize into three-point makes in his prime. His jumpshot could be broken, but the likelihood that a lifetime 85% FT shooter will continue to shoot three-pointers at basically a 10th percentile rate throughout his career is simply too unlikely. Below is every NBA player to shoot 85% from the line (min. 800 FTA) in their age-24 seasons and prior, and their 3PT% in these seasons.

No player in the last twenty years, and thus since the Pace and Space boom, has had such a disparity in free throw and three-point accuracy. Luckily for us, Mullin and Hamilton went on to be two of the most accurate shooters from behind the arc of their eras.

A future where Wagner makes long-distance shots, while impacting the game in every other meaningful way, while hopefully being paired with even the slightest of offensive talent, will be an MVP candidate.

The difference between Wagner and Edwards isn’t substantial enough to call their Tier 1+ prospects like Wembanyama, nor do I think lowly enough of the next five players to reduce them to Tier 2.

LaMelo Ball’s availability and possible noisy OREB influence from Moussa Diabate ended up keeping him from the #1 spot, but he could be the most additive playmaker in the league at his peak. I do not rate any wing or guard teammate he’s played with since he’s entered the NBA (relative to their contract/public perception). Even the ‘best’ of these players have been lackluster as scorers without Ball setting them up.

Kon’s historic rookie scoring season and BMill’s potentially max-contract-inducing breakout were made of two samples: the one where LaMelo’s handle, passing, and gravity pushed them off-ball and into easier shots and better team success, and the one where they were just about league average at their best skills and showed little winning contribution. Ball’s early career defensive playmaking also interests me heavily. The likelihood that a player who posted 17.6 DREB%/2.5 STL%/1.2 BLK% across their first ~4,000 minutes in the NBA is the first percentile defender that his current DRAPM indicates is very unlikely.

Barnes, Cunningham, and Mobley’s lineup data samples have failed to capture their most outlier box score/narrative traits, and thus being more confident in their tier 1+ peaks becomes challenging. Barnes’ all-around defensive footprint is much weaker than one would imagine. While being an elite defensive playmaker (with only solid dTOV influence), his defensive rebounding influence is impossibly poor (and has been since Florida State, which was 300th in the nation in his sole season on campus), and a lack of girth makes teams attack the rim more frequently than league average when he’s on the floor across his career. A long-term collaboration with 2005's Collin Murray-Boyles, of girth and DREB ability, could be the remedy to Barnes’ role peculiarity.

Until we have a multi-season sample of this duo for Barnes, we have to rely on a career of anchoring slightly above-average defenses that don’t see huge falloff when he’s off the court, and Cade’s offensive volume is simply too potent in comparison to be ranked ahead of his Montverde teammate.

Cunningham may be the consensus #1 2001 player, but he turns the ball over way too fucking much for that. Maybe if he shot more threes, like the #3 player on this list, or got all the way to the rim/to the line on his drives, like the younger versions of the ‘99/’98 duo of Luka Doncic and Trae Young, while turning the ball over at this rate, it would be more acceptable. Doncic and Young present a bleak reality where any decrease in burst (not his strong suit in the first place) will push his average 2pt distance further away from the basket and make him increasingly reliant on good-not-great jumpshot touch. The eternal hope is that Cade gets to play more of his career with a 3PAr-generating dynamic handler. If he had one of those on his team, and they played together, that would probably be so cool.

It’s like they’re making fun of us. Free Marcus Sasser. Like with Anthony Edwards, Cunningham’s baseline and frame are too strong to fully fade, and are too in-line with the high-volume needle movers of the past to fade.

Based strictly on NCAA profiles, Evan Mobely should have moonwalked to the #1 spot in 2001, especially from someone that values footers over all else like myself.

Does USC’s finest need to be returned to his own team, barren of teammate help, to maximize his chances at one day reclaiming his spot at the top of his age class? We can probably start with removing him from non-synergistic teammates like Donovan Mitchell, as DLee outlined after their sweep at the hands of the Knicks.

It’s also reasonable to reevaluate his NCAA profile five years later to retroactively establish expectations. What exactly should we be expecting from a player that was always hardlocked at the four due to low weight and a lack of outlier center strengths? His rebound and rim:jumper ratio at USC were never reminiscent of a full-time five in the way his BLK% and team 2PT% did. This apparent ‘softness’ in Mobley’s profile came with many benefits, including elite size-relative touch and playmaking that have aided him in successful seasons in the NBA, but the lineup success (’21 USC finished #7 in Barthag) hasn’t been as strong. Playing next to Jarrett Allen has been a necessity, not for either player, but for the team to maximize lineup talent. It alarms me more than anything that Mobley’s numbers as the ‘solo big’ aren’t really any different than his numbers next to Allen. The grandest consensus fear for Mobley recently has been that this is it. Above-average box score and lineup impact, without clearly elevating any teammates. And even worse? The datapoints to counter this idea are few and far between. Maybe we need 4 more seasons of +7 Mitchell/Allen/Mobley quads.

Closing out tier 1, Jalen Williams’ playmaking leap in his injury-shortened 2026 season is of massive interest to me moving forward.

Could the quintessential deadball-era shooting guard with some of the best anthros on record continue to outperform his high school ranking and draft slot? Conceptually, I believe so. In all likelihood, though, he will continue to massively underperform his athletic markers on the glass, partially because the Thunder have punted the concept of rebounding since Coach Daigneault took over in 2021 (25th in OREB%/27th in DREB%), and otherwise because Dubb’s point guard background pre-growth spurt has left him instinctually deficient in rebounding at the wing-level needed for positive RAPM value on the glass. He actually could be saved on another glass-focused team, but that wouldn’t account for his deadball, Kobe-fanatic middy-hunting preventing heavy enough rim pressure or three-hunting to be a prolific scorer on higher load.

He would have the possibility to ramp up his playmaking volume, and if he retained his current levels of effectiveness scaled up, he could get as high as 3 or 4 on my next rankings (of which I have no timetable for posting).

The fun of ranking 24-year-old players in a forward-thinking project that will surely not be misunderstood by fly-by-nighters is that 24-year-old All-Stars and even All-NBA players can be surpassed in impact by players who currently play fewer minutes! The issue for the two players in question in tier 2, Jalen Johnson and Deni Avdija, is that they’ve both hit the classic threshold of wing/forward offensive load that magically decreases defensive impact.

This works in their favor in the short-term, as the two-way perception earns accolades and contracts. In the long-term, neither of these players started from a high enough defensive floor to not end up as 1-way PRA farmers if complacency from both player and franchise sets in.

Deni’s 1-way could turn into a 0-way situation quickly without a shooting leap, which there’s little reason to project. The FTr-or-bust method is not effective enough when the shooter is league-average at the line, and the rest of their offensive decision tree is a bricked jumper or a turnover. This, as a first option, has led to rather weak results, mostly leeching lineup value from playing with some combination of Portland’s possession value masters in Clingan/Thybulle/Murray. Johnson’s 2026 leap came with a much more similar career process than Deni’s, and is thus more likely to be replicated in the future; if he is closer to a 35% 3PT shooter than a 32% one, his stable value as a scorer and monster defensive rebounder should outweigh his procedurally low FTr (nothing like the ‘dunks on everyone’ guy’s signature move be a restricted area reverse pivot fadeaway).

If Suggs didn’t share the Extreme Turnover Man gene with Cade, I believe he’d just as well have a case as a top 4 or 5 player in this class, and he very well could be if his FT%+3PA per 100 possession leap ends with elevated 3PT%, which seems likely. High feel trumps all and eventually becomes elite shooting. You have to max out some attributes before others just to find a spot on the Pro-Am team.

Some one-liners/queries/ideas to close out Tier 3:

Aldama- Super interested in his post-Jaren era. Mentioned it in my JQ ‘Why Hasn’t This Worked?’ post, but their lineup data together was always pretty poor compared to the team baseline. Intuitively, how many footers with handles can you play if they don’t rebound and their handles don’t equate to playmaking? Not two. Maybe one. Maybe zero. The ternary (that’s binary, but with three) lineup construct of handlers, wings, and bigs with no non-outlier hybrids may prevail.

Jaylen Clark- With DDV out of the 2026 rotation, the relationship between Ant and JC should be similar to that of Devin Booker and Jordan Goodwin.

Sometimes, it takes two guard-sized players to make the impact of one wing.

Manon- This is my favorite post on my page. The storytelling of basketball is so beautiful, I could cry. If I knew Alijah Arenas was gonna make it to the league, I’d be so scared for him.

I’ll conclude by sharing my full 2001 160+ player rankings for this class, as I think being provided with the actual list is what may be stopping some from making their own age ranks! Thank you for your time.

Nile!