Sports Illustrated‘s Top 100 list returns, aiming to answer that question.
As always, this is a wide-ranging exercise with a host of qualified candidates. There’s an abundance of information and analytical resources available with which to assess players. The rankings were again determined holistically by a combination of data and subjective evaluation, aiming to take players out of their team contexts and look at their skills and performance in a vacuum. These rankings are specifically for the upcoming season, and they do not take into account players’ long-term prospects or career arcs beyond 2020–21.
It’s best to look at these rankings as short-term projections, based on performance history and the impact of a player's age—some growth can be expected from younger players, and a degree of potential decline from older veterans. This is not a representation of a player’s trade or market value, and it does not account for the impact of his salary relative to his production. The list attempts to account for the entirety of a player’s impact—on offense, on defense, structural and otherwise—and tends to favor those with the most malleable skill sets.