The NBA's Most Highlight Friendly Players

A look at which players are most often featured in the NBA’s Top 10 Plays of the Night

My most Casual fan-coded trait is that I’m obsessed with the NBA’s Top 10 Plays of the Night.

Every night, the NBA releases a countdown of the top ten plays from that day’s slate of games. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more thoughtfully curated and concentrated source of highlight-worthy dunks, buzzer beaters, and individual slices of basketball greatness. I consider it appointment viewing with my morning coffee.

One reason they appeal to me is because they remind me of being a kid and tuning in to ESPN to catch the SportsCenter Top 10. Back then, before social media or YouTube, if you wanted to see highlights you needed to seek them out. Now, there’s an entire industrial complex dedicated to serving up the latest Kyrie crossover or LeBron tomahawk dunk in real time via push notifications.

These days, I don’t have to look for highlights. They look for me.

That’s part of what makes the NBA’s Top Ten (henceforth referred to as the T10) so great. I’m bombarded with basketball content all day long and yet I’ll often see plays in the T10 that didn’t make the rounds on social media. A Svi Mykhailiuk chase-down block on Jordan Hawkins might not go viral on twitter, but I know it’ll be featured in the T10.

That’s by design, according to Beau Estes, better known among T10 fans as The GOATmentator.

Estes is one of the narrators for the T10 and works with a team of producers who decide which highlights make the cut each night.

I spoke to Estes over the phone for this story and he told me that the goal of the T10 is to showcase the best the league has to offer in terms of single play highlights. The T10 isn’t trying to put a spotlight on the league’s biggest stars or its biggest markets. The only thing that matters, according to Estes, is the play itself.

“When you work with the highlights, you lose all player and team allegiance and you just look for the best highlights,” said Estes.

One night the top play might be Anthony Edwards posterizing Chet Holmgren. The next night it might be Keyonte George throwing Drew Eubanks an alley-oop. T10 viewers are just as likely to see a Moussa Diabate highlight as they are a highlight from Kevin Durant.

“If four of the top ten plays come from a game in Charlotte, so be it,” Estes told me. “I don’t care.”

In an effort to see who the NBA’s most highlight-friendly players and teams are, I set out to track the T10 throughout the 2024–25 regular season. For each day of the regular season, I recorded which players were featured in the T10 and what they did to make the cut.

My dataset includes 1,365 individual highlights. People who can do division will notice that isn’t divisible by ten. That’s because, on a lightly scheduled day of basketball, the NBA will sometimes package just the top five highlights rather than the top ten.

Either way, we have more than enough here to see who stood out for their flashy play last season.

But before we dive into specifics, I thought it might be helpful to cover some summary statistics about the data to give you a lay of the land.

Top 10 Kinds of Highlights

Throughout the season I was keeping a running log of who was featured in the T10 and what for: a dunk, a pass, a clutch play. The table below details the different kinds of plays that were most frequently featured in the T10.

• Buzzer beater refers to any end-of-quarter or end-of-shot-clock play

• Clutch is a game-winning, game-sealing, or game-tying play.

• Circus shots are instances where a player threw up a wild shot and it went in.

• Everything else should be self-explanatory

Dunks made up more than 36 percent of all highlights featured in the T10. In an era that is defined by the shots taken furthest from the basket, it’s the ones closest to the rim that are celebrated the most.

It goes without saying that this data reflects the choices made by the people who curate the T10 and not necessarily NBA fans at large. Still, I think there’s something about an in-game dunk that makes more of an impression on viewers than an in-game three. Chicks may dig the long ball, but dunks reign supreme in highlight clips.

LaMelo Ball’s (Fun)House of Highlights

One of the things I enjoy most about the T10 is that you don’t have to be a good team to produce a good highlight. Obviously having talent helps. But you can be at the bottom of the standings and still show occasional glimpses of excellence.

Here’s how often each team was featured in the T10 last year compared to their Net Rating.

In general, the best teams were featured in the T10 more often than the worst ones. But it’s noteworthy that the Charlotte Hornets (-9.1 Net Rating) can produce as many T10-worthy plays as the Oklahoma City Thunder (+12.7 Net Rating). The Hornets might not be good, but at least they’re fun. Call it LaMelo Ball’s Funhouse of Highlights.

The Los Angeles Lakers were featured in the T10 more than any other team last season. I know I said star power and market size don’t dictate what makes the T10, but the Well, But LeBron Exception applies here.

The Brooklyn Nets finished last season with just 18 appearances in the T10. But if you count all the times that Ziaire Williams and Nic Claxton were on the wrong end of a T10 poster dunk then their total would go up.

Fans will inevitably complain about a lack of respect their team gets in the T10 or decry the amount of attention another franchise receives. But that’s a feature, not a bug, according to Estes.

“I know we’re doing our job right if every fan base is unhappy,” Estes told me.

The Most Highlight Friendly Players

A simple tally of T10 appearances doesn’t tell us who the most highlight-friendly players are, since a first-place finish means more than a 10th-place finish, and an alley-oop finish shouldn’t count the same as a coast-to-coast dunk

To account for these nuances, I created a simple scoring system to help assign a point total to each highlight:

• A first place highlight is worth ten points. A 10th place highlight is worth just one¹.

• Solo dunks are worth full credit.

• An alley-oop, since it involves two players, is worth half credit, split equally between the passer and the dunker.

• Highlight-worthy passes are split 75/25 between the passer and the finisher. A flashy, no-look, behind-the-back pass ain’t worth jack unless the receiver puts the ball in the basket.

• Buzzer beaters, highlight blocks, circus shots and everything else not mentioned earns full credit under my arbitrarily designed Highlight Points scoring system.

After I finished assigning credit for each highlight, I summed each player’s Highlight Points to create the following ranking:

Ja Morant tops the list despite appearing in just 50 games last season. It helps that Morant had the number one highlight on five separate occasions last season — tied with Anthony Edwards and Donovan Mitchell for the the most among any player in my dataset. Morant hit for the cycle with number one plays featuring his passing shooting, dunking, game-tying, and game-winning plays.

LeBron James was the most frequently featured player in the T10, but had just the second most Highlight Points. That’s because most of his highlights landed in the lower half of the countdown (spots 6–10) rather than the top five. Still, I consider James’ looming retirement an existential threat to the entire NBA highlight industry.

Luka Doncic finished third in my Highlight Friendliness ranking. A Doncic pass was the single most common highlight in the T10 this past season. There were a total of 18 Doncic passes that were featured in the T10 last year — with LeBron on the receiving end of several of them.

Giannis Antetokounmpo had the fourth-most Highlight Points this season. What makes Giannis unique is that he’s frequently featured in the T10 for both offensive and defensive reasons. He recorded six highlight blocks, which was more than any other player in my dataset.

See the footnotes² for a list of the top 100 players by Highlight Points.

There’s Always Room For Desert

As an “analytics guy” you might think I’d scoff at the value of a highlight. Obviously, they don’t say anything about how good a player is or how much they help a team win games. But at the end of the day, basketball is supposed fun.

Beau Estes described the NBA’s Top Ten Plays to me as “a scoop of ice cream at the end of a long day for basketball fans.”

I think that’s a perfect way to describe it. You can’t make a meal out of highlights, but you’ll go to sleep feeling unsatisfied if you decide to skip them.

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Not Top 10

Since it’s Friday and I’ve already mentioned SportsCenter once, it’s only appropriate that I showcase the Not Top 10 — or rather, the players that were most often on the wrong end of a T10 highlight this past season.

The list below shows the ten players that were most frequently shown getting posterized or blocked in the NBA’s Top Ten Plays of the Night this past season.

Where were you when Pat Spencer detonated on Walker Kessler?

1. On days where the NBA only released five plays instead of their normal ten, I adjusted the points total for each highlight:

• 1st place = 7.5 points

• 2nd place = 6.5 points

• 3rd place = 5.5 points

• 4nd place = 4.5 points

• 5th place = 3.5 points

2.