It’s time to update the NBA Rookie Rankings. While the class remains one of the least productive we’ve seen in league history, there has at least been some player improvement that has lifted the class. However, injuries are unfortunately wreaking havoc.

More rookie players have a significant role around the league than they did a month and a half ago when we did our initial rankings, but the overall production remains wanting. Two guards who had been quite good will be out for an extended period; the Philadelphia 76ers’ Jared McCain will miss the rest of the season with a torn left meniscus, while the Oklahoma City Thunder’s Ajay Mitchell will miss 10-12 weeks following turf toe surgery. They remain highly ranked here but will obviously drop in next month’s iteration.

A few quick notes: We rank the league’s top 15 rookies, based on how they have performed as NBA players. These are not based on how they are doing at the time of the rankings or a projection of the players they will become. These are full-season assessments of how they have played so far in their NBA careers.

What do I look for when I rank players? Minutes and roles matter. What is each rookie getting asked to do? How often are they seeing the court? Are they being asked to create offense for their teams? Is their role limited, and how successful are they in that role? How successful is the team with them within that role? What is the degree of difficulty of said role? Is the player logging real minutes on a good team or eating up minutes on a bad team that doesn’t have anyone better?

This is an art, not a science. The rankings involve examining numbers and analyzing a painstaking amount of tape, and I value the latter more. I wrote about three players below, as well as gave some quick notes on the rest of the players in the rankings.

Alex Sarr making leaps

I typically don’t love to write about rookies two months in a row, but the leap Sarr has taken over the last month or so has to be acknowledged. In the 16 games before a total stinker against the Houston Rockets, Sarr averaged nearly 15 points, seven rebounds, 2.5 assists and 1.3 blocks per game while shooting 48 percent from the field, 43 percent from 3 on nearly five attempts per contest and 61 percent from the line.

The overall impact is still a bit of a mixed bag, but let’s start with the good. The flashes that Sarr shows continue to be more intriguing than the flashes for just about any first-year player. The skill that has really popped this month has been the passing, as the game is starting to slow down for him. Early in his rookie season, things still looked quite rushed for Sarr as he adjusted to the pace of the game and the increased space he sees, as opposed to the FIBA rules he played under in Australia last year. But now things are starting to coalesce. The Wizards love to run him in pick-and-pop or pick-and-short-roll situations, where his ability to quickly diagnose the court is improving. He’s starting to see four-on-three situations better and starting to understand where to look.

Here, the Chicago Bulls put two on the ball against Jordan Poole, and Sarr needs to be the release valve in the short roll. I love the way he puts the ball on the deck once, takes a quick look to the strong-side corner to force Zach LaVine to rotate across, then rises to sling a pass to Justin Champagnie in the opposite corner. He’s not rushing; he’s just calmly moving defenders where he wants before putting the ball where it needs to go.

The shooting has much improved, as Sarr is up to 31 percent from 3 on the season after a disastrous start. He’s also starting to feel like he can attack and try to get to the rim when he catches the ball in that foul-line area. The results here are decidedly mixed, if not just outright poor. Sarr is shooting 41.2 percent on his layup attempts, the fourth-worst mark in the league for any center, per Synergy. He also takes an inordinate number of floaters and mini-hook shots because he doesn’t always get all the way to the rim thanks to his lack of physical development, and he makes just 32 percent on those shots combined. Finishing in the paint right now is Sarr’s single biggest hindrance toward being a purely impactful offensive player.

However, you can see the flashes and tools and easily project where this is going as he gets stronger and more capable of dealing with contact. Look at this play from that same game against Chicago. This ends up being a broken play in which Bilal Coulibaly passes the ball off Patrick Williams’ elbow before recovering it and getting it to a cutting Sarr. Look at the way Sarr power dribbles once, gets low and spins around Nikola Vučević for an easy layup attempt. He smokes the layup, which is what makes this a perfect encapsulation of the issue. But guys who are 7-foot-1 with Sarr’s length don’t really do this kind of stuff. This isn’t normal flexibility. It’s easy to imagine what Sarr will look like after two offseasons, when he’s not quite as afraid of getting bumped off his line.

Maybe Sarr never becomes a real finisher. If not, there are real flaws in his game, because the best way to take marginal advantage of his skill set remains playing him at center. But he has touch, as he displays from the perimeter. It feels more like a consistency issue than a permanent skill issue.

So why is Sarr ranked No. 6 after this strong run? First, he’s not really contributing to wins, and I tend to give the benefit of the doubt to rookies who help their teams win games. Second, the defense has a bit more to go. It’s all fixable, but the consistency also is also an issue on this end.

It largely has to do with his defensive positioning. Much like with his offense, he shows serious flashes of positive play. He’ll switch out onto guards at times and look extremely comfortable sliding his feet. His weakside rim rotations provide a serious presence, and his length does a good job of cutting off angles because he typically has his arms extended out. And yet, in ball screens, there is a lot of work to do. He’ll get off his line regularly and allow easier paint touches and finishes than you’d expect. As a post defender, stronger players can bury him on the block, as the Rockets’ Alperen Şengün exploited last week. His defensive rebounding has improved, but he’s still under five per game on the year. Sometimes, he gets a bit high in his stance and loses track of where he needs to rotate around to in scramble situations.

Many of these things are fixable with experience and added strength. Sarr will become a better ball-screen defender with reps, and he’ll start to understand how long he has to engage mentally in plays so he doesn’t get burned by missing a closeout in a scramble. Then on the block and with his rebounding, he’s going to add real weight throughout his career to absorb more contact through his lower body. Again, bend isn’t an issue here. As long as Sarr is willing to put in work in the weight room, he should be able to handle opposing players on the block even if he’s never necessarily elite at it.

Overall, though, these are positive steps for the Wizards’ rookie. I didn’t expect him to compete for the Rookie of the Year award. He came into the NBA quite a bit rawer than some of the other rookies. This was a tools bet, pure and simple. If the bet paid off, the Wizards would theoretically be getting a 7-foot center who could space the floor, pass and defend. So far, the Wizards should be happy with his progress even if the work isn’t remotely close to being done. This is going to be a multi-year effort for both Sarr and the team as they continue to rebuild. But the early returns look promising as Sarr continues to take strides.

Yves Missi keeps it simple

The New Orleans Pelicans had one significant roster-based question coming into the season before all hell broke loose, all their highly paid players got hurt and the entire year went off the rails: What would the center position look like?

The team entered the season with a veteran who struggled to get minutes consistently last season in Daniel Theis, a 2018 second-round pick in rookie Karlo Matković and their first-round pick this year, Yves Missi. The front office hoped that one of that trio would eat enough minutes on the interior to allow their top-six players to thrive.

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Not only has Missi eaten minutes, but he looks like a potential long-term answer at center. He’s averaging 9.2 points, 8.4 rebounds and 1.4 blocks while shooting 55 percent from the field. He’s not a perfect player, but his ability to put pressure on the rim has been enormous for the Pelicans.

The big thing that stands out about Missi is the downhill pressure he creates out of screen-and-roll situations. A truly elite athlete at the center position — he posted a 39-inch vertical leap at the combine last year — the Cameroonian big man is an auto tag in ball screens. If the defense doesn’t get a body on him early or doesn’t make itself available to his roll from the weak side of the court, he’s going to sky above the rim and throw down. But more than that, Missi’s athleticism is incredibly functional on an NBA court. Many big men who have something in the vicinity of a 39-inch max vertical leap need to load up off two feet to access that level of explosiveness. Missi doesn’t. He can take off from just one foot and sky with his head at rim level, as you’ll see below here in a game last week against the Sixers.

That allows him to get to the rim a bit quicker and beat more help defenders to the rim. Per Synergy, Missi’s 64 dunks this year are 12th-most in the league. But Missi is going to have to keep working on his touch and overall efficiency. Only Rudy Gobert has missed more dunks than Missi’s 14. Some of these Missi dunk attempts are truly outlandish ones where it feels miraculous that he even reached the ball, but they still result in missed shots. He’s shooting just 82 percent on dunk attempts. Missi is also only making 51.9 percent of his layups this year, per Synergy. Among centers to take at least 50 layups this year, Missi’s mark is sixth-worst (Sarr is slightly worse). Some of those attempts are a bit less audacious and should probably be going in. Despite that, Missi’s offense is impactful, and his ability to see the court as a passer in short rolls is also continually improving. He’s looking opposite corner more frequently to find the open man and is averaging over two assists per game versus 1.1 turnovers in his last 12 games.

The defense, on the other hand? It’s hit or miss, particularly in ball screens. That was my main concern with playing him big minutes as a rookie, and those worries have borne themselves out. It’s worth noting that he’s been, essentially, the lone constant in a lineup decimated by injuries. There hasn’t been any time to build continuity between him and his guards. And yet, he does often feel a bit off his line. Sometimes he’ll overplay to the middle and allow a guard rejecting the screen to get downhill. Sometimes, he’ll let his man turn the corner. Other times, he’ll find himself in no-man’s land and get caught on a dunk. Or he won’t be close enough to the level to impact the ballhandler. Then in the rare moments when the Pelicans have him play at the level, it feels like he’s trying to lunge a bit too often, and his base gets a bit too wide and he loses any mobility that he has. His defensive stance just seems very high.

It does feel like the Pelicans are generally trying to keep things very simple for Missi and largely having him drop very deep beneath the foul line while guards fight around screens. Even so, he just feels caught in between two minds on where exactly he needs to be a bit too often. These decisions need to be made in split seconds around the rim, and the cat-and-mouse game that big defenders have to play against guards is exceedingly difficult. It’s made even more difficult because Missi isn’t exactly enormous for the center position. He came in at 6-11 without shoes last year, but he doesn’t have monster length with only a 9-1 1/2 standing reach. The leaping ability makes up for it a bit, but he doesn’t take up as much space when he’s ground-bound as you’d think. His margin for error is a bit smaller than others, and here’s a good example of that. Tyler Herro and Bam Adebayo run an empty-side ball screen here, and while I have quibbles about Dejounte Murray’s angle, Missi provides zero presence at the basket against Herro. Typically, you’d like to see the big commit there to stopping the layup, with the guard peeling off onto the big to try to stop the dump-off (that’s why you see Murray take his final steps toward Adebayo as opposed to trying to recover back onto Herro).

Tristan da Silva holds down fort

The track record of selecting players 23 and older in the top 20 of the NBA Draft isn’t exactly sterling. However, the Orlando Magic seem to have nailed the evaluation on da Silva to buck the trend.

Much like with many rookies in this class, da Silva’s numbers don’t jump off the page. His shooting efficiency is in the toilet because he is only making 31 percent from 3 after having made right around 40 percent from distance in his last two years at Colorado. However, over his last 12 games, da Silva is averaging 12.4 points, 5.3 rebounds and 2.3 assists without really turning the ball over or making defensive mistakes. Despite dealing with injuries in that time to all three of the team’s young stars in Paolo Banchero, Franz Wagner and Jalen Suggs, the Magic have won five of those 12 games to stay afloat while they wait to get healthy.

The German wing is an extremely smart basketball player. What stands out most is his cutting and ability to move off the ball. He is always working to find open areas in the court where defenders have to guard him. He’s an excellent screener for his teammates, constantly trying to make contact with their defender and then using that momentary confusion to dart toward the rim. Sometimes, this cutting will come in the run of an action that Jamahl Mosley calls from the sideline. But other times, it comes naturally. If a defender is overplaying da Silva to stop him from going to get a dribble handoff, he’ll read that and dive to the rim quickly. If he feels his defender is helping too aggressively on a ballhandler while he’s in the corner, he’ll make a break for the rim. That last example is what happens here when Cole Anthony drives and tries to draw defenders toward him at the rim. Eventually, New York Knicks big man Precious Achiuwa takes the bait, and da Silva recognizes it immediately. He pounces on the mistake and gets all the way to the rim for an easy layup.

His off-ball movement isn’t selfish, either. He’ll cut knowing that one of the defenders will rotate to him, opening up an angle for a pass to one of his teammates. He’ll get a pass on a cut and hit a little interior dump-off pass or kickout. The odds are that da Silva won’t be a star player, but he’s going to be excellent in his role as soon as the shooting comes around given his intelligence, size, and unselfishness.

He’s also a sharp defender who always makes the right rotations and seems to disrupt play with his size off the ball. Even dealing with several different player combinations this year, he always seems to talk out there and do his job. He’s never been a massive blocks and steals guy, but that’s not all there is to defense. The Magic win da Silva’s minutes even though he came off the bench to start the season and has only played about one-third of his minutes with Wagner on the court. He’s played about half his minutes with Suggs out there, but the Magic fare better on defense when da Silva is on the court without Suggs, giving up 107 points per 100 without Suggs versus 111 with him and da Silva together.

Yes, there are moments when da Silva gets powered through because he’s still quite skinny. Strength and starting to make shots from distance will be the swing skills here for da Silva becoming a long-term starter and not just a fill-in when both Wagner and Banchero are on the court. But it’s clear he’s already jumped last year’s lottery pick Jett Howard in the wing rotation, and he’s already started 29 games. With Banchero finally back after a 34-game absence and Wagner eventually returning, da Silva will likely shift back to the bench at some point. But he’s proven he can be an impact player who complements the two Magic stars.

Other notes

• The Memphis Grizzlies’ Jaylen Wells and Zach Edey stay in the top two spots, just swapping places. Wells is the rookie most consistently impacting winning basketball right now, and Edey has only seen action in 24 contests. You can count on Wells for 25 minutes per night at least of solid defense against relatively difficult assignments and real shot-making from distance. The scoring might fluctuate, but he makes the right decisions and gives real effort and energy. Edey’s presence also consistently helps Memphis. He had a 15-game stretch before his previous three when he had a positive plus-minus in every single game. While single-game plus-minus doesn’t mean a ton, when you start to stack results like that together on top of his averages of 10 points and eight rebounds, it says a lot about how useful he’s been.

• The next tier starts at No. 3 with McCain and stretches down to Missi at No. 7. I think you could put Nos. 3 through 6 in any order and it would be reasonable. McCain still sitting at No. 3 is a statement both to how little value this rookie class as a whole has provided as well as his terrific play before his injury. McCain’s stretch of games from Nov. 8 until Dec. 8 is, by far, the best any rookie has played this season. In that 15-game run, he averaged 20 points while shooting 46 percent from the field, 40 percent from 3 and 86 percent from the line. He’s still played the 12th-most minutes of any rookie (more than Edey and Mitchell and essentially equivalent to Ron Holland II and Ryan Dunn). McCain won’t be featured this high in the future as more players continue to put together fuller seasons of value. But even with the 13 games he’s missed, he’s sixth among rookies in total points, ninth in total assists, fourth in total 3s made and fifth in total free throws made.

• Stephon Castle’s monthlong run as a starter from Nov. 7 to Dec. 8 was the best run by any rookie not named McCain. The scoring efficiency wasn’t exactly there, but he averaged 15 points and five assists versus only 2.3 turnovers and played tremendous defense for the San Antonio Spurs. Playing off Chris Paul as a secondary playmaker, Castle was a sharp cutter who also played well in ball screens with Victor Wembanyama. However, once Jeremy Sochan came back, Castle shifted back to the bench and is averaging just eight points while shooting 36 percent from the field and 16 percent from 3 in that time. The passing and quick decision-making are there, but he’s not getting as many easy looks and isn’t ready to create offense for himself yet. It’s tough to play Sochan and Castle together, as the duo’s lineup data is quite poor. When they play together, the Spurs lose their minutes by nearly 12 points per 100 possessions. When they play separately, they win their minutes. Figuring out how to get two non-shooters on the court is going to be huge for the Spurs moving forward.

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• Zaccharie Risacher suffers from similar scoring issues as Castle without being quite as impactful as a defender or passer. He’s making just 40.6 percent from the field and 28.8 percent from 3. But as usual, this is one of those times where it is important to watch the games and understand that his impact is still valuable even if he isn’t scoring effectively. Risacher is averaging 10.7 points and 3.4 rebounds for the Atlanta Hawks as a solid fifth starter. He rotates effectively across the play on defense and covers a bunch of ground. He makes quick decisions with the ball and doesn’t stop the defense from getting out of rotation when the Hawks are on offense. He looks like a really solid long-term starter in Atlanta’s new-found team build, where they surround Trae Young with long, athletic wings.

• Mitchell’s injury was terrible timing, as the Thunder were quickly reaching a point when they needed to convert Mitchell from a two-way contract to a roster spot to make sure their backup point guard would be able to keep playing (two-ways are limited to just 50 games). I assume they will still convert him, as he proved enough to get a real contract. The Thunder won’t want to risk restricted free agency with him this summer after he showcased that he can be a critical bench player on one of the two best teams in the league as a rookie. The Thunder have won Mitchell’s 560 minutes this season by nearly nine points per 100 possessions, which is completely ridiculous. His ability to make quick, accurate decisions, shoot the ball and organize the offense has been huge.

• Dunn has entered the starting lineup for the Phoenix Suns and continues to be an impactful defender. The team is about three points better per 100 possessions defensively when he’s on the court, and plays better overall. But his shooting has fallen off since his hot start. He’s shooting just 30 percent from 3, including 25 percent in his last 21 games. Donovan Clingan has had a few monster games for the Portland Trail Blazers but has largely been stuck as the backup center behind Deandre Ayton. Bub Carrington continues to run the show in Washington but has been inefficient.

• A new entrant worth mentioning this month is Holland, who continues to provide energy for the Detroit Pistons even if his offense remains a real question. He gives a ton of effort on defense, gets out in transition and has remained in the rotation for a Pistons team that has taken an enormous leap while creeping around .500. Dalton Knecht also comes in after some strong games earlier this season for the Los Angeles Lakers. However, his defense remains a real issue.

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(Photo of Alex Sarr and Zaccharie Risacher: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)