Walker Kessler Is Already A Top-40 NBA Player

Pretend for a minute you cannot read the name on the back of the jersey of the player in the above image, and that you have not read the title of this article. From there, try and guess who the missing name is that fits this list of every NBA player in the 2022-23 regular season, sorted by win shares, as calculated by Basketball-Reference.com.

It seems unlikely, but it is true. In amongst all those All-Stars sits Utah Jazz rookie centre, Walker Kessler.

Use a different metric, and you’ll find a similar result. On the same website, using the VORP rating instead, Kessler ranks 48th, with only one other rookie – Jalen Williams of the Oklahoma City Thunder – placing in the top 100. Kessler also ranks 49th in FiveThirtyEight’s own formulation of the WAR metric, and in their own RAPTOR ranking, he ranks even better at 37th, tied with All-Star and Most Improved Player candidate Domantas Sabonis.

Furthermore, all of those metrics attest to the idea that Kessler has had essentially as much impact in his rookie season as the veteran All-Star he replaced. Now of the Minnesota Timberwolves, Rudy Gobert ranks 86th in VORP, 50th in WAR, 59th in RAPTOR and 28th in win shares. This seems close enough to be able to call it a wash, and perhaps even advantage Kessler.

Regardless of any individual ranking of their performances this season, the two are on very different trajectories. The 21-year-old Kessler has been, alongside another Most Improved Player candidate in Lauri Markkanen, one of the cruxes behind an upstart Utah Jazz team that greatly surpassed all expectations before pulling their own plug, and is unequivocally a big piece of whatever their future turns out to be. By contrast, Gobert – always an awkward fit along Karl-Anthony Towns – has seen his production go backwards in all categories on a spluttering Wolves team, while also turning 31 in June.

In terms of his basic per-game averages, Kessler’s line of 9.1 points, 8.4 rebounds and 2.4 blocks in only 22.4 minutes per game, on a league-leading 72.1% field goal shooting, tells a pretty accurate picture of how he impacts the game. He leaves the paint on offence only to screen, and is even less effective from the outside on defence, yet in his own areas, he is already a force.

When swatting shots in the paint on one end or slipping to the rim on the end, Kessler is hugely impactful, playing a Gobert-esque style to Gobert-esque levels, except with the advantage of having nine years on his forebear. He is an intimidating interior defender, and while teams already strategise to pull him away from the basket whenever they can, everyone has to go inside eventually. And with two – two! – made jump shots from outside the lane on the season, Kessler may have more potential down that road than the Stifle Tower has ever shown at this level.

None of this is meant to denigrate Gobert, a three-time All-Star and three-time NBA Defensive Player of the Year who remains a very good player, if not any longer at the very height of his powers. Instead, it exists solely to promote Kessler. From the lowly expectations conveyed by him being the relatively low 22nd overall pick, and the fact that he was but one part of a massive overall pick-heavy trade package, Kessler’s excellence as a rookie has been made all the more striking by how unexpected it was. The Jazz have been far better than most expected, and of no one is that more true than Kessler.