By the end of next week, the offseason will have begun for nearly half of the NBA.
As the playoffs progress, more and more teams will have gone, as they say, fishing. In less than a month only around a quarter of the league will still be playing.
But everyone will still be working.
NBA Player Tiers: ’20 | ’21 | ’22 | ‘23: Tier 5| T4| T3 | T2 | T1
Rust never sleeps and neither does roster evaluation. Though the NBA tends to have two major flurries of roster movement — either from the draft through the July free agency period or in late February leading into the trade deadline — properly using those windows requires preparation and strategizing. Some of that prep is the intelligence-gathering process of figuring how the rest of the league values players, both yours and their own. This defines the moves that are possible.
But more important for a franchise is correctly deciding which kinds of acquisitions and transactions are desirable. That determination requires context, more specifically answers to questions such as “Where are we now and what do we need to get to where we want to go?”
Perhaps reductively, the operative questions are “Who do we want to keep?” and “Who do we want to get, if possible?” Addressing either requires a hard-eyed evaluation of both a team’s current roster and the talent and impact of other players around the league. I say “hard-eyed” because it can be overwhelmingly tempting to take overly rosy, best-of-all-possible-worlds views of both the talent on hand and what a new player might add.
The exercise of creating these assessments is why the Player Tiers exist.
“Why not rankings instead?” is a common question, and the reasons for being more categorical are twofold.
First, ranking players can often be highly inefficient. Time spent arguing over whether Giannis Antetokounmpo or Nikola Jokić is a better player can be diverting for fans and is relevant for media voting on post-season awards. But for 28 teams in the league, the answer is “Who cares?” Regardless of whether the arguments for one or the other prevail, if either player is available mountains should be moved to get them. Time is a scarce resource and at least at the strategic level digging any deeper than “both are awesome” is wasted.
The second reason is that for players of similar overall level, which one is “better” is much more about which has a more favorable situation. Jokić will likely win this season’s MVP over Antetokounmpo (among others) in large part because Denver’s stability both enables and reflects his greatness in a way the season-long turmoil in Milwaukee has not for Antetokounmpo.
That’s the “Why?” of tiering players. The “When?” is continuous. As more information emerges about each player, mostly in the form of additional games played, it’s a necessity to understand not just how good a player has been in the past, but how good they are now and what that trajectory might imply about how good they will be in one, two or three years time.
Of course, it’s not practicable to go through the entire exercise of sorting players into tiers daily. Most of the in-season adjustments are informal. But with the end of the regular season almost upon us, now is a good time for a broader update, both because taking this view is very useful in terms of setting expectations heading into the postseason while also identifying players who have a lot to gain or lose over their upcoming playoff runs.
For details on the broad methodology, take a look at the intro pieces I’ve done as part of the full offseason rankings each of the last four years, but here’s a quick refresher:
• The tiers are intended to represent the players most useful toward winning a championship, and doing so in the next season or two. Thus, they are heavily playoff weighted in a way which penalizes some players (such as Domantas Sabonis) while benefiting others (Jimmy Butler, for example).
• The tiering is meant to be both age and contract agnostic. This is not an attempt at trade value rankings. To reiterate, being overpaid is not considered a sin in these tiers beyond the fact certain player archetypes who will be both heavily compensated but also likely see diminished value in the postseason are downgraded because that combination makes building a genuine contender around or even with them more difficult.
• I give players finishing their first year an upward adjustment based on the degree to which even productive rookies tend to be ineffective but often improve greatly by their second year in terms of helping their teams win minutes. Two of this year’s rookies (Chet Holmgren and Victor Wembanyama) have been legitimately impactful so are placed in Tiers 3 and above. Meanwhile, Brandon Miller has been both promising and has shown great improvement in Charlotte, landing him in Tier 4. When I do the full 125 player list this offseason, a few other rookies such as Amen and Ausar Thompson, and Jamie Jacquez will also appear.
• Beyond this “rookie bump,” I do not make any aging curve related adjustments up or down, other than the degree to which injuries or age appears to have already diminished a veteran player.
• Little differences matter lots at the top.
• The size of each tier is informed by past research suggesting the league’s hierarchy is reasonably stable in terms of shape. In most seasons, there are three to seven players at a Tier 1 level, corresponding to producing in accordance with the 35 percent “Supermax.” So the effort is made to have somewhere in that range of players in Tier 1. Tier 2 more or less rounds out the top 20. Tier 3 is the rest of the top 40-50, while Tier 4 is in the Top 75-80 range.
In this exercise, I cut Tier 4-plus off at the Top 80 players because who doesn’t like a nice round number? Of those 80 players, 67 were in last offseason’s top four tiers as well. Three of the new admittees are rookies which means only 10 players have bumped up. So far.
Today we’re rolling out Tiers 3 and 4, which is an intriguing group because the top of Tier 4 is somewhat of a ceiling for role players. I probably got a little overexcited about Mikal Bridges post-deadline run in Brooklyn, and while he’s been plenty good for the Nets this year, it seems clear he isn’t enough to drive winning as a top option.
Meanwhile, it’s possible I’m making the same, or at least a similar mistake with Derrick White this year. I have a type. In terms of players “graduating” from Tier 4 into higher groups, White is joined by Brandon Ingram, the resurgent Kristaps Porziņģis and one other guy we’ll discuss in more detail tomorrow when Tiers 1 and 2 are revealed.
Beyond those specifics, the “stickiness” from last season is largely intentional as well as being in recognition that for many players at the top end, the playoffs will be the separator.
I’ll discuss it more tomorrow, but there was little if anything those like Joel Embiid, Luka Dončić or Jayson Tatum could have done this regular season to improve on their 2023 offseason landing spots.
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Tier 3
Tier 4
(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Photos: Getty: Cooper Neill / NBAE, Pepper Robinson / NBAE, Nic Antaya)
