Philadelphia 76ers guard VJ Edgecombe put together an impressive rookie season in which he averaged 16.0 points, 5.6 rebounds, and 4.2 assists after being selected with the No. 3 pick in the 2025 draft. He also averaged 1.4 steals per game and shot 43.8% from the floor and 35.4% from deep.
The young guard always seemed to shine when the lights were brightest. He had big moments in the fourth quarter throughout the season and then became the first rookie to have 30 and 10 in a playoff game since Tim Duncan in 1998 when he had those numbers in a Game 2 road win over the Boston Celtics.
HoopsHype ranked the top 27 shooting guards in the NBA currently and Edgecombe comes in ranked No. 8 on the list:
Second-year 2-guard VJ Edgecombe’s outlook for 2026-27
could rely, to an extent, on how the team plans to utilize LeBron James. James could very well play point guard for the Philadelphia 76ers, which gets tricky because both Edgecombe and Tyrese Maxey will need a lot of the ball, too. That’s without even mentioning the newly acquired Jaylen Brown and star big man Joel Embiid.
Edgecombe surely has spent and will continue to spend a lot of the offseason working on his outside jumper, as he’s going to get a ton of wide-open spot-up looks with the new-look Sixers, an area where he was respectable, especially for a rookie, in 2025-26. Edgecombe was in the NBA’s 67th percentile as a spot-up shooter last season, producing 1.10 points per possession on the play type.
Besides that, Edgecombe’s 2026-27 will be fun to watch; his explosiveness as a slasher and finisher around the basket as a first-year player was astounding, and we only expect it to get better next season. Edgecombe is also a good rebounder and playmaker for his position, and a disruptive defender, averaging nearly a steal-and-a-half per contest as a rookie.
Edgecombe will certainly need to find ways to adjust and still be helpful for a Sixers team that will look very different in the coming season, but he has such a high basketball IQ and a maniacal work ethic. There is little doubt that he will eventually be able to figure it out. One has to believe the second-year guard will, once again, be able to find a way to contribute to the team's success.
This article originally appeared on Sixers Wire: Sixers' VJ Edgecombe ranked as the No. 8 shooting guard in the league
