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Oldest: Manu Ginobili, San Antonio Spurs, 40

Argentina is a developed nation with emerging tech sectors and a refined culture, but it is also home to an ancient ritual few know of.

It is said adolescent boys are made to watch Manu Ginobili whip nutmeg passes through defenders' legs and dunk on players half his age, and this teaches them what it means to be a man. It's a time-honored rite of passage.

Also, many smaller rural villages baptize babies only with water drawn from the tap of Ginobili's childhood home. Every child so blessed automatically becomes left-handed and three times as competitive.

If you actually care more about basketball than Manu apocrypha, Ginobili was the only guy in the league last year (of any age) with an assist percentage over 20, a steal rate over 3.2 and at least a 39.1 percent conversion rate from deep. He remains special as he enters his fifth decade of life.

And you can't necessarily assume the reason he plays just 18.7 minutes per game is because he can't do more. The Spurs manage his minutes as carefully as anyone's, but in the seven regular-season games in which he played at least 24 minutes, Ginobili combined to shoot 13-of-28 from long range. That's 46.4 percent, which tops his overall figure on the year.

If you need him to play a bigger role, he can do it.

Youngest: Terrance Ferguson, Oklahoma City Thunder, 19

Ferguson's peers rated him the second-most athletic and third-best shooter among incoming first-year players in the NBA's annual rookie survey, which...sure. The rookies voting in last year's survey also thought Kris Dunn would win Rookie of the Year, so, at the risk of emphasizing a point that should need little underscoring, teenagers have bad judgment.

Ferguson does, too. Nothing major—all he did was needle the Thunder after Klay Thompson torched them in the 2016 Western Conference Finals. Oklahoma City subsequently drafted him anyway.

Potentially an end-of-bench option but more likely a frequent visitor to OKC's G League affiliate, the rookie has a long way to go after skipping college and spending last year playing professionally in Australia.

I will do anything necessary to celebrate Manu. Full disclosure: I'd take Ginobili over several All-Stars this year. I am clearly not reasonable about him, but I feel pretty safe taking him over a 19-year-old made up of nothing but question marks.

Winner: As if there were any doubt. Ginobili.