Hollinger & Duncan NBA Show - NBA Basketball Podcast · John Hollinger and Nate Duncan

Top-10 Players in the NBA 2025-26

·1 hr 22 min·2 clips

Shea Gildas-Alexander is framed as the best player on a 65- or 70-win team by point differential.

The show opens with its usual format, notes that this is one of their core episode types, and points listeners to the free feed, YouTube, or Dunked On Prime for ad-free access six days a week. The hosts then move into the ranking discussion. Availability is the first principle on the table. That point shapes almost everything that follows. A lot of elite players have missed time, and the hosts do not treat that as a side note. It is part of the ranking. From there, they start sorting through the names at the top. Luka is a central example. One host says he is not really buying Luka that much at this point, even while still crediting what Luka has done in the playoffs. He points out that Luka has been the best player on a team that beat a very good team in the conference finals, and that he has other big postseason successes on his résumé. Cade comes in as the cleaner health comparison. The case for him is not that he is automatically better. It is that he has fewer obvious flaws and does not really get hurt. The hosts keep circling back to whether that should matter more than proven playoff production. Giannis gets folded into the same tier of discussion. His case is tied to the idea that the league may have adjusted to him in the playoffs more than he has adjusted back. That becomes part of how they weigh him against the others. The conversation also makes clear that the top three feel stronger than before, while spots four through ten feel much less settled. The wobble is not framed as a knock on the players so much as the result of injuries, lower confidence, and the difficulty of ranking stars who are not equally reliable right now. They keep breaking the list into tiers instead of pretending every slot has the same level of certainty. A ranking gets offered, then tested against playoff outcomes, team context, and how much a contender can realistically ask from a superstar. The tone stays conversational and a little combative throughout. By the end, the episode lands where it started: the league’s best players are still elite, but the order among them is harder to pin down than it used to be.

As heard by us

A sharp ranking debate that treats the league's hierarchy as a live argument.

The discussion treats the league hierarchy as something still being argued over, with availability carrying real weight and playoff translation close behind it.

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Why you'd press play

You want a top-10 NBA ranking debate that actually wrestles with the edge cases.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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