Houston Rockets point guard Fred VanVleet is the team’s highest-paid player, but he isn’t always recognized as one of the organization’s best players.
Bleacher Report reporter Grant Hughes ranked VanVleet as the most underrated player of the last five years.
“It’s hard to know what to make of the 2019-20 season, when VanVleet’s Raptors were actually 2.3 points worse per 100 possessions with him on the floor. But the fact that his worst differential over the last four seasons was +5.9 suggests we can view that one season, in which he recorded the only negative number of his career, as an outlier,” Hughes writes“VanVleet was named an All-Star in 2021-22, but he’s produced roughly similar numbers in each of the five seasons we study. If there were an All-Decade team, both the individual stats and the team-oriented numbers indicate he’d be a natural fit.”
VanVleet, 30, averaged 17.4 points and 8.1 assists per game in his first season with the Rockets, and in his second year he should continue to play a key role in setting his teammates up for success.
If he can do just that, the Rockets could make their first playoff appearance since the 2020 COVID bubble in Orlando.
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