Right now I’m trying to decide if Thomas Bryant is a top five center in the league. Or at least top ten. In order to make this determination, I’m just going through all the teams in my head, figuring out who their best center is, and then comparing them to Bryant. I could attempt to do something more methodical involving stats or even just looking at a list of teams to make sure I don’t miss any, but I don’t feel like expending that much effort. This exercise is already taking too much effort on my end.
[a considerable amount of time later]
Okay, so I’ve made my official decision. Bryant is a top five center in the league, but he’s at the bottom end of the top five, and there’s a lot of centers who are right around him in my mental rankings. The official list of centers who are definitely better than him right at this moment and are also unambiguously centers (rather than power forwards):
Joel Embiid (despite his zero-point game being very fresh in my memory)
Nikola Jokic
Clint Capela
Rudy Gobert
You can argue all you want about my determination, which was made with only vague ideas about points per game, defensive effectiveness (not that I care about defense in any way), or what counts as a center, but you can’t argue that Bryant is establishing himself as one of the best young bigs in the league.
Also, I just have to get this off my chest: in this one game, Thomas Bryant displayed more willingness to pass the ball than Kobe Bryant ever did in his whole career. Boom. Roasted. If you don’t mind, I will continue to take potshots at Kobe’s career while he’s not here to defend himself.