NBA Top 125 players for 2022-23: Russell Westbrook, RJ Barrett among those in Tier 5

Editor’s Note: Welcome to the third annual edition of Seth Partnow’s NBA Player Tiers project, in which he names the top 125 players in the league after each season and then separates them into five distinct categories of value, each with their own sub-categories to further delineate them. These are not meant to be read as firm 1-125 player rankings. Rather, they’re meant to separate solid starters from the very best superstars, and every level in between. This is how NBA front offices assess player value across the league when building their teams.

We’ll unveil the full list throughout the week of July 11-15. 

• Monday: Introduction, Methodology and Tier 5 (84-125). [See below].
• Tuesday: Tier 4 (41-83)
• Wednesday: Tier 3 (20-40)
• Thursday: Tier 2 (8-19)
• Friday: Tier 1 (1-7)
  

With the 2022 Draft in the rearview and the majority of this summer’s free-agency movement resolved, it’s time to assess where teams are. The importance of how the players on each roster fit with each other and with their coach’s preferred method of play should not be understated. But the NBA is a league built around talent.

To avoid rehashing too much, I’d encourage people to go back and read my introductions to last year’s and the 2020 edition of The Athletic’s Player Tiers for detailed explanations for how we do this. But to briefly sum things up: the margins at the top are very small – as we saw in the most recent NBA Finals – and differentiating the best, from the stars to the simply very good, is imperative in evaluating each team. Whether the purpose is management determining just how close their team is to a title and acting accordingly, or a fanbase setting reasonable expectations, the trap of fudging those differences is an important one to avoid.

To that end, the Tiering process is intentionally exclusionary. For the most part, when in doubt, push ‘em down. This is not simply the result of me being contrary (though I am), but is based on empirical research.

Across a variety of metrics, over a long period of NBA history, I’ve found that there are a relatively set number of players who perform at various levels in any given season.

• Around five players per season perform at a “supermax” level, worth 35 percent of a team’s salary cap or more, as well as significantly add to a team’s championship equity.
• Another 10-15 perform at a “veteran max” level, worth 30 percent or more of the cap.
• A further 20-25 players perform at a level justifying a “rookie max” at 25 percent of the cap or higher.
• Between 30-35 produce at around 20 percent of the cap.
• Another 50 to 75 provide some additional championship equity on top of their “everyday” production, but only a minor amount.

This results in a sort of “good-to-great” range of 125 to 150 players who “matter” from a championship perspective at any one time, and thus form the structure of the tiers.

In general, I’m aiming for three-to-seven Tier 1 guys, with Tier 2 stretching out over the rest of the top 20, down to the top 45 or 50 for Tier 3. Tier 4 makes up the rest of the Top 75 or so, and the remainder of the top 125 includes Tier 5, with 125 being an arbitrary (and somewhat conservative) number that has caused no small bit of agitation about the exclusion of certain players each season.

To slot players into those tiers, I start, but don’t end with metrics, as I’m trying to identify their impact towards winning (or at least contending) for a championship. Some of the major factors considered:

• I weigh playoff viability and success highly. While regular-season floor-raising matters, lifting a team’s ceiling matters even more.
• As such, I try to envision that player in the role they would likely play for a contending team. This does lead to some tension when deciding between a top role player and a more middling offensive hub.
• I consider the whole of a player’s recent career, not just last season. This serves to eliminate, or at least reduce, wild year-to-year swings in player tiering due to factors often outside of their control — changes in role/situation; a period playing through a nagging injury or simply production altered by a lengthy slump or hot streak. Evaluating anyone “in a vacuum” is incredibly difficult, because context plays a large role in performance even for the very top players, but I do my best to smooth that out. The chart below (thanks to Saurabh Rane for the assist with the data visualization) illustrates the year-to-year movement over the three years I’ve published tier groupings:

• Especially for players with long track records, I tend to give the benefit of the doubt for a single season that goes completely off the rails. Yes, this strongly influences where I slotted Kevin Durant.
• Health is only a factor in cases when a player might be permanently diminished by an injury or is so prone to getting hurt that you can’t count on them for more than 55 or 60 games a season.
• I do my best to ignore salary; being overpaid doesn’t make someone a worse player, just a worse trade/cap asset. And I’m tiering players, not ranking assets.
• Rising second-year players get a small bump in terms of projected improvement from last year, but everyone else is largely “come as you are,” though I try (not always successfully) to be aware of signs that a player is on the verge of falling off the steep end of the late-career aging curve.
• As a final tiebreaker, to reiterate: when in doubt, push them down. While occasionally a team will underestimate the talent on their roster, it is far more common to elide the difference between an All Star and a superstar. The numerical ranking gap between, just as an example, Devin Booker and Luka Doncic might be around 10 slots, but the difference in impact, especially in the playoffs, is enormous across even small differences at the top of the pyramid.

Reliability and Role

A final comment before getting to the list of players in Tier 5: As time goes by, what might be called my basketball system of values continues to evolve based on the NBA game changing in ways that favor different skill sets — and as I (sometimes repeatedly) learn hard lessons about what works.

For example, in the past, I’ve overrated the specialist. It is no longer enough to simply have a single elite NBA skill and be a high-level contributor without doing more. If one were to create a continuum of NBA wing play, you wouldn’t be too far wrong to have Duncan Robinson and Matisse Thybulle take up either end of the spectrum. Whether deep shooting or defense, these two certainly possess that single elite attribute.

Yet their deficiencies in other areas dramatically reduced their ability to impact (and in Robinson’s case, even get on the floor) in high-level playoff series. Instead, having a degree of versatility —  the malleability to function in different lineups and against different styles of opposition — has increasingly become more important in the NBA. There is room on a contender’s roster for situational options — an extra big body to deploy against the Sixers or Bucks, a ball-hawking backup point guard in anticipation of facing the Warriors or Suns. But having a special club in the bag doesn’t mean it’s one you expect to swing often, and this list is about outlasting all 29 other teams, not just providing some defensive resistance against Steph Curry specifically.

The main effect of this is that bigs have taken a hit in my estimation relative to perimeter players and especially wings. I don’t totally subscribe to many of the notions around the evils of drop coverage, or that non-switchable bigs aren’t playable. But a player being exploitable himself without having a concurrent rock-paper-scissors advantage over another group of players borders on disqualifying him.

The other aspect which has become essential in my eyes is reliability. I don’t necessarily mean game-to-game statistical consistency, or even the ability to avoid injuries. Slumps in play happen, and especially over the course of an 82 game season, players are going to miss time as the league continues to treat health maintenance  more cautiously.

Rather, what I mean by reliability is two-fold.

First, there is an element of discounting for the unknown. Dallas’ recent acquisition of Christian Wood is a perfect case in point. The 2022-23 season will be Wood’s 8th as a pro, including 2017-18 when he did not appear in the NBA. He will be 27 on opening night. He’s never appeared in a playoff game. There are reasons to suspect Wood’s game might not translate, especially on the defensive end.

But even were he a player whose game I thought more easily scaled into a rotation role on a contending team (for example, his former teammate Ja’Sean Tate) guys like Bobby Portis (a similar archetype) or Kevon Looney (not at all similar) have already done it. While some exploitable holes in a player’s game are obvious enough that it isn’t required to see them actually be exploited in a series, others only show up under that stress. Surviving that initial test, or, even better, first failing and then overcoming those flaws matters a lot.

Worse than players you don’t know if you can count on are those you know you can’t. Is the player prone to pick up silly fouls? Get too focused on referees? Shrink from the increased physicality of the postseason? Break out of team schemes on either end of the floor in attempts to play heroball? Talent misdirected isn’t much help when trying to win at the highest level, so ensuring that a team’s top players are consistently pulling in the right direction is vital.

On this front, I’m more lenient with younger players than veterans. Some of these failings are the result of inexperience or represent areas that could benefit from either physical or skill development. Jaren Jackson Jr. has plenty of opportunities to address his foulbox tendencies, while Anthony Edwards will surely improve time and score awareness when it comes to his shot selection. We hope. For those players, I take those drawbacks into account, but don’t want to eliminate them from the conversation.

There are a few other players (we’ll get to them in due course) who no longer have the excuse of growing into the league. One such player in Tier 5 who possibly should be higher based on talent is Edwards’ teammate D’Angelo Russell. Simply put, a point guard of his skill level and experience simply can’t have his volume of poor decisions with the ball at inopportune times and hope to play a key role in his team advancing deep into the playoffs.

Speaking of Rusell, to finish up, I should note that some of the hardest players to properly tier are the not-quite-star players with large on-ball roles. How to compare an extremely effective role player to a middle-of-the-pack offensive lead is an unanswerable question, and my attempt to do so is to consider what a player’s ideal role would be on a top-level team and how well they have (if it’s a role they have filled) or likely would perform (based on their skill set if they haven’t.)

If there is a player type I’m lower on than consensus, it is the moderate- or low-efficiency bucket getter who doesn’t bring much value in other areas. While more shot creation is not a bad thing, top teams generally need complementary skills much more. So if you wonder why players with modest counting stats such as Alex Caruso make the list over some others, this is the reason.

On to the Tiers themselves. There are 29 new entrants, 17 of whom land in Tier 5 with the rest in Tier 4. Four of these (Tyler Herro, Maxi Kleber, Kevin Love and P.J. Tucker) return after dropping out a year ago and appearing in the 2020 version.

Of the 29 players dropping out, five were Tier 4 and 24 hailed from Tier 5 including four of my “last five in” though that is as much due to the arbitrary “Top 125” cutoff for Tier 5. When in doubt, push them down.

(Top photos of Russell Westbrook and RJ Barrett by Cameron Browne and Sarah Stier/NBAE via Getty Images. Design by Wes McCabe)