Lamar Odom looked at ESPN's top 100 NBA players list, decided it missed the mark, and took his swing at the very top of it: he wants Jalen Brunson at No. 1. Not top five. Not "underrated." First.
It is a big take and Odom knows it, which is most of the point. Guys who played fifteen years in the league do not usually spend their mornings litigating rankings, and Odom's resume gives him a little standing to be loud about it. Fourth overall pick in 1999. Two rings with the Lakers in 2009 and 2010. Sixth Man of the Year in 2011, which is the award they hand to the guy whose value never fit neatly into a box score line. If anybody on earth has earned the right to be suspicious of a list, it is the guy whose whole career lived in the margins of one.
And Brunson is the perfect vehicle for that argument. He was a second-round pick out of Villanova, where he won two national titles and went from useful freshman to consensus national player of the year. He has been doubted at every stop for reasons that mostly amount to his height, and he answered it by becoming the guy New York hands the ball to when the shot clock is under six and the building is losing its mind. That is the case Odom is making, whether he spelled it out or not: rank the players who decide games, not the ones who decorate them.
Does the argument hold? Probably not at No. 1, and Odom almost certainly knows that too. Ranking lists are consensus machines and consensus is rarely wrong at the very top; it is wrong in the muddled middle, where the eighteenth guy and the thirty-fourth guy are basically the same player with different jerseys.
But the noise is the feature. Every fall the list drops, every fall somebody who actually played calls it nonsense, and the argument carries us into the season. What I am watching is whether Brunson makes Odom look prophetic by spring, because that is the only rebuttal that ever sticks.
