Evan Mobley landed at No. 26 in ESPN's NBA player rankings, a drop of 13 spots, and the reason attached to it is his shooting decline rather than anything happening on the defensive end. That is the whole story, and it is a more interesting one than a number on a list usually is.
Let me say the obvious part first, because someone has to. Player rankings are a preseason parlor game. Nobody wins a playoff series in September. But they are also a decent mirror for how the league talks about a player, and the way the league is talking about Mobley right now is as a defensive anchor whose offensive ceiling has become an open argument instead of an assumption. That shift is the actual news. The slide is just the receipt.
The context matters here. Mobley won Defensive Player of the Year for the 2024-25 season, the year Cleveland went 64-18 and owned the East's best record. That is not a résumé that usually gets marked down. What gets marked down is a big man whose jumper goes sideways in a league that has decided every frontcourt player needs one, and that is precisely the box this ranking is putting him in. Fair or not, the shot is the thing people are grading.
checked the almanac: Cleveland took Mobley third in 2021, behind Cade Cunningham and Jalen Green, and the argument that night was whether a long, skilled, unselfish big could be a franchise's best player in the modern game. Five years later the league is still asking him the same question. Different phrasing. Same question.
What comes next is the part I'll be watching with the season less than a month out. Not where he sits on a list in September, but whether the shot comes back with volume and whether Cleveland asks him to keep taking it through a cold stretch. A team that won 64 games in a season doesn't need Mobley to become a different player. It needs him to be a slightly less avoidable one. Everything else about him already travels.
