Thinking Basketball Podcast.

My name is Ben.

Welcome back to episode five of our summer series on the 25 greatest peaks of the first 25 years of the 21st century.

That was a lot of 20s.

I didn't realize how many 20s were in that sentence.

Let's just, let's level set.

Let's recap where we're at for everyone.

If you're just joining in right now,

because you are a big fan of early 2000s basketball

and you can't wait to get to this player. I understand. You had to skip all these other players. But we did our honorable mentions. We had a bunch of players that could have gotten in. Jason Kidd, we went with number 25. We talked a lot about the power of his passing. There's an interesting lingering idea that we'll circle back to more as we get to some of these upcoming

players. Jason Tatum, I guess we had two Jasons. Jason Tatum was number 24. He had a much narrower

range. Dwight Howard was number 23. Dramon Green was number 22. We're starting to get into

sort of our low-level MVP players. Mono Genobley was 21.

James Harden was 20.

I should point out, I don't remember if we said this at the end of the last episode,

but James Harden not only represents sort of a leveling up as the players get better and better here,

but James Hardin, I think his high range is around like 13th on this list. It's tough because as we go

through the episodes, I'll change a couple players based on our conversation and things like that.

But right now, that's the range we're talking about. We're talking about a guy that could have been

down as low as the end of this list, like number 25, if we took a pessimistic view of all the things we

discussed that are challenges for James Harden.

And then if we take the optimistic view all the way up to 13th, that's what we're talking about.

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