Before his team hosted the Celtics on Sunday, Cavaliers head coach Kenny Atkinson raised eyebrows when he said Boston boasted one of the top five players in the NBA — and didn’t name Jayson Tatum or Jaylen Brown.
In Atkinson’s eyes, veteran guard Derrick White belongs in that elite class.
“Derrick White is a top-five player in this league,” Atkinson told reporters, via The Athletic, before the Celtics defeated the Cavs 109-98 at Rocket Arena. “I know no one says that in the standard media, but analytically, if you look at all the advanced stuff, he’s a top-five player in the league. Superstar.”
Though White has never been recognized as such — he has zero career All-Star selections and no All-NBA nods in nine pro seasons — he does rank among the league’s best in several of the advanced metrics Atkinson referenced. As of Monday, he was ninth among all qualified players in net rating. He was eighth in estimated plus/minus, as calculated by analytics site Dunks & Threes, among players who have appeared in more than 10 games.
The players ahead of White in EPM — Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Nikola Jokic, Victor Wembanyama, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Kawhi Leonard, Luka Doncic and Donovan Mitchell — have made a combined 24 All-NBA first teams and won six of the last seven NBA MVP awards.
In conventional plus/minus, he sat second, behind only reigning MVP Gilgeous-Alexander. The Celtics have outscored opponents by 495 points with White on the court over his 62 appearances, nearly 150 points better than the second-ranked Celtic (Neemias Queta, plus-347). Before Atkinson’s declaration, several other opposing head coaches called White one of the most underrated players in the NBA.
To quote a text message from White himself, as shared by friend and co-host Alex Welsh on a recent episode of their “White Noise” podcast, the 31-year-old “(doesn’t) have All-Star numbers, just All-Star impact.”
“It’s just probably what people aren’t measuring is his defensive impact,” Atkinson told reporters. “That’s hard to measure, and it’s hard for your average person — everybody maybe mainstream looks at just the offensive, but he’s an elite defender. Elite on both ends. So that equals, to me, for coaches in this league, for players in the league, that’s how we look at him: as a great player in that bucket.
“Again, analytically, I think it’s probably proven in various places that he is that player, and that’s how we treat him. He really disrupts you defensively. He’s an elite rim protector, probably the best guard rim protector in the league. Just take all those things and put it in there, and with the shooting, you’ve got a great player.”
White’s most impressive box-score statistic this season has been his blocked shots. He’s tallied 90 of those as a 6-foot-4 guard, ninth-most in the league and already a career high. White was the Eastern Conference’s Defensive Player of the Month for February, and he’s building a strong case for what would be his first career first-team All-Defensive selection, following a pair of second-team finishes in 2022-23 and ’23-24.
Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla has raved about White’s defensive versatility, calling him the type of player who “makes guys around him better defensively.”
“I think at the end of the day, you guys don’t have a ton of access to the advanced analytics, so I think that’s a part (of why White isn’t recognized),” Mazzulla told reporters Sunday. “I think the second piece is that type of play is just not commercialized. But at the end of the day, D-White’s a connector in the standpoint of, I think one of the hardest things to do in the NBA is learn how to have complete confidence and also be a connector and make other people around you better, and I think he does both of them.”