Four Boston Celtics make Sports Illustrated top-100 NBA player ranking

It seems Boston’s deep run in the 2020 NBA playoffs made a lasting impression.

Four Boston Celtics can be counted among Sports Illustrated’s 2020-21 top-100 players, and while it might not surprise you which ones they are, it might given where the authors ended up placing them.

Rather than a ranking article that bases NBA players’ rankings on their potential trade value, what they ought to earn on the open market, nor their statistical output vs. the cost of their contract according to Woo, but instead “attempts to account for the entirety of a player’s impact—on offense, on defense, structural and otherwise—and tends to favor those with the most malleable skill sets.”

So with that caveat in mind, which Celtics made the cut, at what rank — and why?