The NBA’s Next Face: A Data-Driven Look at the League’s Most Marketable Players

December 8, 2025

By: Neil Zhou

(Special E-board Feature)

"No one had to market Michael Jordan. I marketed myself by what I did on the court. What I did on the floor drove the marketing, not the other way around. The Jordan Brand was driven by what I did every night playing the game.” – Michael Jordan.

As an avid NBA fan, I’ve seen my fair share of ads featuring basketball players. It started with binge-watching endless Footlocker and H.E.B. ad compilations back in middle school, to now I see countless State Farm and NBA Cup ads every commercial break. I still fondly recall the time Kyrie swapped bodies with a kid after taking a selfie, or when Tim Duncan “knocked over” a plant celebrating Footlocker’s ‘Week of Greatness’ campaign. Beyond watching them on screen, I’ve also had the fortune of running into some NBA players — all of whom were religiously repping their brands. Harden rocked his signature Adidas line, DeRozan wore Nike Tech, and I recognized Dinwiddie by the massive 361° logo embroidered across the chest of his shirt. Clearly, athletes and branding go hand-in-hand like pepperoni on pizza. This has me wondering — who are the current faces of the league, and are there any hidden gems due for major endorsement deals?

Some pictures with NBA players!

Just the other day, I came across a list ranking the NBA’s top 25 players in terms of marketability based on criteria like personality & charisma, team location, and potential. While I don’t disagree with the list, I wondered if I could take things a different direction. Erase all the off-court intangibles — no brownie points for SGA’s Virgil Abloh-esque fashion or Haliburton’s jubilant personality. Could I quantifiably determine the most marketable players from the on-court stats that I can find online? To this end, I developed a rudimentary system consisting of four attributes: on-court performance, playstyle, physical attributes, and prestige. 

Methodology: Building a Model with Four Variables Behind NBA Star Power

On-Court Performance (55%): People lie, stories lie, but numbers don’t. We all love the players who consistently suit up and fill up the stat sheet. On the other hand, it’s very frustrating to support players when they sit out every other game (sorry, Clippers and Sixers fans). The on-court score adjusts for playing time differences by using averages per 36 minutes and uses ESPN Fantasy Basketball’s traditional system of weighing stats. Since a player’s availability and performances are the first things that fans see, this attribute gets more than half the total weight of this marketability model.

Playstyle (30%): Brian Scalabrine — the White Mamba and sometimes regarded as the worst NBA player ever — famously said, “I’m closer to LeBron than you are to me.” Every player in the league is damn good at basketball, or at least specializes in some aspect of the game. Some of those niches stand out and catch eyes more than others, making certain specialties more marketable than others. I identified four major playstyle archetypes using a combination of total, advanced, and shooting metrics, courtesy of Basketball Reference.

1. Range Shooters: If the NBA’s Renaissance era was characterized by post and mid-range mastery, the avant-garde movement has efficiency beyond the arc. It’s impossible to escape the shift toward three-point shots, with average attempts per game increasing by over 20 throughout the past decade. This makes players who can shoot the leather off a ball stamped by both supporters and opposing fans.

2. Highlight Reels: A few weekends ago in Philly, I witnessed VJ Edgecombe blow past his defender and throw down a monstrous two-handed slam. Just like Anton Ego tasting Ratatouille, I got flashbacks to marveling at LeBron’s athleticism during my first-ever NBA game over a decade ago at the Air Canada Center. Dunks, as well as and-1 plays, are timeless souvenirs that get stadiums pulsing and live rent-free in the spectators’ heads.

3. Winning Contributors: The end goal in any sport is to win, as simple as that. Therefore, players who tangibly contribute to winning while on the court are credited with high Win Shares and Value Above Replacement Player.

4. Team Maximizers: Who doesn’t love it when players thread the needle, connecting individual puzzle pieces into one cohesive unit? This model rewards those who maximize their team's effectiveness by generating a high amount of points through assists and efficiently by not turning the ball over much while earning those assists.

Physical Attributes (7.5%): Remember the pure elation of finding a gold scar in Fortnite? That’s exactly how I felt when I found a Kaggle dataset containing the physical demographic information of all NBA players. I gave taller and heavier players slight boosts in marketability;  all, it’s hard to miss giants like Wembanyama, physical forces like Zion, or mixtures of both like fellow Asian-Torontonian Zach Edey while watching games. The other factor considered was age. Younger players are less proven in the league; conversely, older players have diminishing potential. To reflect this balance, I made the age factor a concave down parabola with the vertex at 26 years old – the average age of an NBA player. Physical attributes had a lower weight of 7.5% as they are less telling of a player’s ability than other attributes.

Courtesy of Jason Leung via Unsplash

Prestige (7.5%): Players come and go, but award winners have their names etched forever in the pages of NBA history. The prestige of these end-of-season awards represents recognition from a global panel of sportswriters, broadcasters, and former basketball legends for fulfilling a highly rigorous criteria. Rookie award recipients exemplify a promise to become the future stars of the league. Winning the Most Improved Player or the 6th Man of the Year awards indicates a player is making the next leap in their career toward stardom. Defensive awards spotlight the most intimidating pests the NBA has to offer. Finally, a spot on one of the three esteemed All-NBA teams means being held to the highest regard as a top 15 player in the world. Of course, the ultimate honor belongs to the best — the MVP.

Some awards were excluded from the ranking as they were either recently added awards, like the Clutch Player of the Year, or mid-season recognitions, such as all-stars and the In-Season Tournament MVP. I down-weighted the prestige factor because it felt slightly redundant considering the other categories. Likely, award recipients will also be the players who put up significant numbers and have an impact on winning games. Regardless, taglines associated with the honors are still certainly a big factor in how marketable a player is.

Data and Results: Who Really Moves the Needle? The Rankings Revealed

It should come as no surprise that “Mr. Consistent” Shai Gilgeous-Alexander tops the list with a 4.12 marketability score. The Ontario native was the man with the Midas touch all year long, becoming the first player in NBA history to win Regular Season MVP, Conference Finals MVP, and Finals MVP. Runner-up is Nikola Jokic, who was neck-and-neck with SGA for best player honors the whole year, with a score of 4.06. Third place goes to Giannis Antetokounmpo — the “Greek Freak” with a body built like Hercules and a determination to get to the basket only paralleled by Odysseus. There is a considerable drop-off in marketability scores following Giannis, with the gap between 3rd and 4th being greater than the difference between 4th and 19th. Sure enough, the top 3 rankings mirror the 3 MVP finalists last season, proving that they were head and shoulders above everyone else. 

Courtesy of Reuters via The Japan Times

Sent to New York in a blockbuster trade last offseason, Karl-Anthony Towns had an immediate impact, helping the Knicks reach the Conference Finals for the first time in a quarter-century.

Rounding off the top 10 list are Evan Mobley, Jayson Tatum, James Harden, Anthony Edwards, LeBron James, Cade Cunningham, and New York’s very own Karl-Anthony Towns. The first players out of the top 10 are Tyrese Haliburton, Trae Young, and Ivica Zubac. For the most part, the list doesn’t have many major surprises. Evan Mobley may not be the first name that comes to mind when you think of the NBA, so his ranking 4th may be shocking. However, he was the best defender in the league and also played a huge role in helping the Cavs obtain a conference-best 64 wins. On the topic of Cleveland, it’s impossible not to appreciate the greatness of LeBron. At the ripe age of 40 — over two decades after he was dubbed The Chosen One on the cover of a Sports Illustrated magazine — “His Highness” still proves his worth night in and night out. Every player mentioned in the chart was an all-star, except Ivica Zubac, whose career tells the tale of an overlooked dark horse, steadfastly putting in the training and galloping his way up the hill. 

Insights: Unexpected Patterns and Hidden Marketability Contours

Chart Produced with the RStudio Code and Microsoft Excel; Salaries from Kaggle

Number One Draft Picks: The Blessing—and Curse—of Being First

Being the top pick overall in a draft is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it’s a blessing that the league views you as the de facto best amongst a vast sea of aspiring professionals; on the other hand, you are cursed to endless scrutiny and insurmountable expectations. Fortunately, it seems that players have been able to manage the astronomical weight placed on their shoulders for the most part. In fact, several top pick players ended up in the top 10 in terms of marketability score, including the GOAT LeBron James, Anthony Edwards, Karl-Anthony Towns, and Cade Cunningham. Former Rookie of the Year winners Victor Wembanyama, Paolo Banchero, as well as 10-time all-star Anthony Davis aren’t far from the top. Even those who battled injuries throughout the season, like Kyrie Irving and Zion Williamson, and those like Andrew Wiggins, Zaccharie Risacher, and Deandre Ayton who were more role players than the go-to guy, still pass as stars based on our model. 

The only exceptions to this case are Markelle Fultz and Ben Simmons — ironically, both of whom were drafted by the Philadelphia 76ers. Currently at the cusp of the Extreme Underperformers zone, the career of Ben Simmons has been an extremely curious case. From winning Rookie of the Year to becoming a multi-time all-star and dating Kendall Jenner, the future looked boundless. Then, just like the hare in Aesop’s Fable, Simmons abruptly stalled and dropped off. It may be due to a lackluster work ethic or nagging injuries (or even both), nobody knows. We just know that he has become a shell of what he once was. Fultz’s career was incredibly unlucky. After suffering a shoulder injury that significantly limited his shooting abilities before even playing a game, Fultz was never given any chances to lead a team. As seen in the chart, he is by far the lowest graded and least paid out of all active top picks.

Noteworthy and Moneyball Players: When Salary and Star Power Don’t Always Align

Courtesy of Team USA

Stephen Curry is a household name that has become synonymous with basketball. Curry justified his price tag as the highest-paid player in the NBA with a marketability score of 2.04, translating to the 97th percentile. As we all know already, the most marketable player was Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who had a salary of $36 million, good for the 93rd percentile in the league. Both Curry and SGA can be classified as “crème de la crème.” On the flipside, much of the league fits in the Borderline Players quadrant. Many of these include old players on veteran deals, such as former champion and Khloe Kardashian’s ex-boyfriend Tristan Thompson, and champion and perennial all-star Kevin Love, who now looks like an elongated version of your average uncle at the cookout. The quadrant is also filled with young talents who haven’t had many opportunities to prove themselves yet. I have a personal vendetta against Jalen Hood-Schifino because the Lakers used up a first-round pick on him in 2023, so it doesn’t surprise me that he’s where he is. It does hurt, however, to see Bronny James down there as well because he’s done incredibly well given his circumstances.

As disappointments go, Joel Embiid’s 44.5 percentile rank for marketability score makes him the only player from the top 10 highest-paid players based on salary and endorsements to be below the 80th percentile. Despite winning MVP just two years prior, the injury curse returned to haunt “The Process” and significantly limit his performance in the few games he was able to play. Former all-star Brandon Ingram also struggled with injuries and inefficiency the past year, all while pocketing $36 million in salary alone. Former EuroLeague MVP Vasilije Micic quickly learned that aside from the money, the NBA wasn’t so sweet, as reflected by his marketability score ranked at a measly 10.1th percentile. When previous Rookie of the Year winner Malcolm Brogdon announced his retirement last month, fans were left confused. Perhaps after seeing his position on the graph, we shouldn’t have been so surprised. Bruce Brown and Tre Mann are other examples of big contracts without the stats or excitement to back it up.

Courtesy of Ryan via Unsplash

Finally, the moment we’ve all been waiting for: who are the Moneyball players–the hidden gems whose marketability strongly outperforms what their current market value suggests? Some standout names here include Detroit Pistons big man Jalen Duren, Denver Nuggets wing Christian Braun, and Portland Trail Blazers forward Toumani Camara. Duren was an instrumental piece in Detroit’s 30-win jump from the previous season that saw them make the playoffs for the first time since 2019. Through the first 10 games of the current season, Duren has once again taken another leap, with a good chance of becoming an all-star. From splashing 3s at an impressive 39.7% to throwing down highlight dunks whenever he gets the chance, Braun not only enforces the trope “white men can shoot,” but also defies the stereotype that “white men can’t jump.” Camara grew consistently both offensively and defensively in his sophomore campaign, earning All-Defensive Second Team honors and a significant contract extension over the offseason. Hall-of-fame son Scotty Pippen Jr., USC standout Isaiah Collier, and key contributor to Indiana’s unlikely Finals run Andrew Nembhard are some other names that the model projects to be more marketable than their worth. Irrespective of whether I was a local or global brand, I would immediately start negotiating deals with all those players before they become more “Hollywood.”

Basketball Is Data, but the Magic Is Memory

Courtesy of Markus Spiske via Unsplash

It’s important to acknowledge that while the process to determine marketability scores and the graph comparing the scores to player salaries may look convincing, there are countless limitations. For one, it’s entirely based on data from the 2024-2025 NBA season. If we used stats from this season or literally any other recent year, the new face of the Lakers, Luka Doncic, for example, would be a lock for a top 10 rank. Furthermore, the model puts crafty guards at a disadvantage and favors taller and heavier players. It goes without saying that this reasoning is extremely flawed. As it’s impossible to account for every possible factor, any method of evaluating players is largely subjective. It just so happens that in my time brainstorming what factors make a player more recognizable than others, this ended up being the system that I came up with. 

Regardless of potential shortcomings, I hope that this fun experiment provided some insights into the landscape of the NBA and the endless, captivating storylines surrounding its players. While there’s certainly a lot of criticism surrounding the NBA’s marketing, I will always love watching the sport as it resonates with a lot of my personal values. Reading any basketball-related content takes me back to fourth grade, when I brought in a calendar with all the Raptors games after watching a preseason game between them and the Miami “Heatles.” For the first time in many years, I was having basketball discussions in tandem with friends over the gleeful tunes of lunchtime recess. I sincerely hope that my love for the sport was able to also spread to you at some point in this article and sparks something that inspires you to be more receptive to NBA content if you aren’t already. So the next time you’re watching ads between your favorite TV shows, keep an eye peeled for anything NBA related! And the next time that you go shopping, be sure to look into (or dare I say, consider buying) some basketball apparel!