Projecting the best NBA players at the 2024 Paris Olympics - ESPN

Not every player in the 2024 men's Olympic basketball tournament does his usual work in the NBA, nor is every single NBA star present at these games. (Looking at you, Kawhi Leonard.) But with the U.S. in its typical perch as gold medal favorites — pre-tourney hiccups against South Sudan notwithstanding — and international players gaining more prominence in the league, NBA performance is as important as ever when assessing the Olympic field.

With that in mind, we rank the top players at the Paris Olympics based on their projected 2024-25 NBA performance.

How this works: We'll be using Estimated RAPTOR as our measure of player effectiveness, since it incorporates individual stats with a player's effect on his team's play while on the court. The projections are largely modeled off of Basketball-Reference's Simple Projection System; every player who played in the NBA over the past three seasons receives a forecast on offense and defense based on his (age-adjusted) Estimated RAPTOR in those years. You can read about the details of the calculation here.

One caveat is that these projections are designed to tell us how good a player will be over the entirety of the 2024-25 NBA season. Since the Olympics are happening much sooner than the 2025 NBA Finals, players who are particularly young or old might be on a different aging trajectory by the end of next season than they are now. For instance, this is why LeBron James (who'll turn 40 in the middle of next season) might rank lower than we'd expect based on his play last season. But at the same time, veterans playing in the Olympics have had a compressed offseason, so they might be feeling the effects of their age already.

Either way, these forecasts should tell us who is poised