UNIQUE returns one copy of each distinct value. SORT can order that spill without changing the original list. Deduplicating names is different from deleting duplicate rows: two people can share a name, and repeated team labels may be valid records.
RANK gives tied scores the same position and leaves a gap afterward. If two candidates tie for first, the next rank is third. A top-N report needs a policy for that boundary. FILTER with a threshold from LARGE keeps everyone tied at the cutoff, so the result may contain more than N rows. Sorting and taking exactly N rows is a different policy. Read the request before choosing one, and keep the candidate names attached to the scores.