# 40 Most Underrated & Overrated Seasons of the Decade



## Cornholio (Feb 13, 2005)

> Recently, Football Outsiders listed their 25 most underrated and overrated players of the decade (BTW, is anyone even surprised that FO favorite Bobby “Mr. 3rd Down” Engram showed up high on the former list, or that longtime whipping boy DeShaun Foster topped the latter?), and it got me to thinking about assembling a similar list for the NBA.
> 
> To me, these are players who have the largest gulf between their perceived and actual values. Actual value is easy — we just use the ever-trusty Win Shares — but perceived value is a bit tougher. I used to pick up the old Basketball News annuals back in the day, and they would rank players by what they called “PAR (points + assists + rebounds) per game,” I suppose thinking that it was some kind of complete player ranking (which is laughable now, but hey, this was the Dark Ages of the 90s). And to me, that’s the conventional wisdom in a nutshell for all but the most hardcore fans — I mean, what did you used to look at first before the APBRmetric revolution? Typically just PPG/RPG/APG, right? And maybe if you were really ahead of your time, FG%? So I’m going to use “PAR/G” as a barometer for how the “general public” views a player. Maybe things have gotten better in recent years, but I doubt it.
> 
> Now, all we have to do is subtract each player’s ranking in WS from their ranking in PAR/G (minimum 70 GP or 2000 MP), and we’ve got ourselves a decent metric for determining overrated/underrated-ness (positive numbers being good, and negative ones being bad, naturally). Instead of aggregating over the entire decade, though, I’m going to list below the 40 most underrated and overrated individual seasons of the Oughts, so players can and will show up multiple times on each list. Let’s get to it:


http://www.basketball-reference.com/blog/?p=3140


There're 5 Rockets on the "Most Underrated" list: Deke, Shane (x2), and Hayes (x2).


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## OneBadLT123 (Oct 4, 2005)

Nice, 3 of them in the top 10 as well


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## Dean the Master (Feb 19, 2006)

Always good to have underrated players on your team. It only helps.


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## Damian Necronamous (Jun 10, 2002)

They're trying to say someone is underrated according to statistics? That's retarded. Being "rated" has nothing to do with statistics.

They have Fabricio Oberto on that list. He got like 4pts and 5rbs a game. You can't say he's underrated.

Incredibly stupid article, IMO.


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