NBA Player Tiers: Russell Westbrook, Ben Simmons, Zion Williamson among the league’s greats (but not quite elite) (2024)

Throughout the week, we’ll be sorting the NBA’s best 125 players into five distinct tiers, differentiating solid starters from the league’s absolute superstars while offering insight on them and everyone in between. For a full summary of how the list is constructed and the metrics we rely on, refer back to our introductory story,which also includes Tier 5.

In many ways, Tier 3 represents the necessity of the entire exercise of player valuation and rough ordering. The players in this tier are undoubtedly stars. Most of them have been All-Stars, and many of them will be again, perhaps several times. These are great players. What they are not are the greatest players in the game today, and that distinction, while harsh, is crucial. The difference in impact, not just in the regular season but especially in the playoffs, between the 25th- or 30th-best player and the fifth-best is simply massive. For many teams, there is a temptation to describe someone in the 25 range as a “franchise player.” But operating as if that is the case puts that organization at an insurmountable disadvantage against those teams with actual, inner circle, franchise-defining talents.

While several of these players are on the cusp of establishing themselves as that kind of pantheon-level superstar, passing what my colleague Danny Leroux has termed the “Him Alone Test,” they aren’t there yet. And the players at the top of the mountain tend to stay there, so more of the aspirants will fail to reach that level than will succeed. The result is a swathe of individuals who can take over a game, perhaps even a playoff series against evenly matched foes, but are much more likely to achieve ultimate success as the nearly equal sidekick.

A lot of the commentary below will likely seem overly harsh, but to repeat myself, picking those nits that separate the great from the elite is the whole purpose here. The greatness of these players is largely assumed by their presence in this company, so for the most part, we have to look at what is keeping them from being higher rather than what brings them to this level.

Tier 3C: Players 31-36

If thisgroup is the reason for doing tiers,Zach LaVineis the player most representative of that need at the moment. Not necessarily for anything specific to LaVine’s game, but more his circ*mstances. It has been widely acknowledged that Chicago’s recent roster decisions — trading for Nikola Vucevic at the last trade deadline, adding Lonzo Ball, Alex Caruso and crucially DeMar DeRozan this summer — have been made with the goal not just of making the Bulls better but to help them retain LaVine’s services, which is a worthy goal!

He’s an All-Star and Olympic gold medalist coming off a career season, and such players are virtually impossible to replace. However, there is a categorical difference between a situation such as the Bucks moving heaven and earth to try to secure a long-term commitment from Giannis Antetokounmpo (more on Jrue Holiday in a moment) and a team doing so for a player of LaVine’s stature.

A big part of the reason I have been so down on the Bulls’ summer moves is the question of what building around a player of this level gets you. There is enough secondary talent on the Bulls that, were LaVine in the upper stratosphere, they would be at least borderline contenders. I could end up being very wrong here, but I predict Chicago is much more likely to have to battle to avoid the Play-In Tournament than it is to secure home-court advantage in the first round.

So, having placed LaVine in Tier 3, why does he remain in 3C after his spectacular 2020-21? It has less to do with him and everything to do with 2020-21. With the turbocharged offense and extremely hot shooting seen around the league for much of the year, I have a blanket skepticism toward players who managed outlier-type career seasons. It came up Tuesday in the discussion of Julius Randle, and I’ll reiterate similar points with LaVine, but he set a career high in true shooting by nearly 6 points. Entering last season as a career 48.4 percent shooter on 2-pointers, LaVine made 57.1 percenta year ago. He exceeded his career marks by a stupendous amount from every area of the floor:

Is it possible he improved his game in many different areas in one offseason? Certainly. He is still of an age (26) where big upgrades would not be unheard of. Is it likely he made that muchof an across-the-board leap, or should we expect some settling in 2021-22? I’m again willing to be proven incorrect by the coming season, but I need to see at least one more year at close to that level before I totally buy such a universal jump in performance as sustainable and real.

• Draymond Green remains an all-world defender, as well as a very useful playmaking foil for Steph Curry. His scoring touch has largely been abandoned. Should that trend continue or even worsen as Golden State adds Klay Thompson back into the mix and presumably brings on other offensive pieces to complement Curry, it will be hard for Green to maintain a spot this high up the tiers for another year. But there was enough of the old Warriors magic between Green and Curry to allow me to give him the benefit of the doubt for one more year at least.

I have no idea what to do with Russell Westbrook. For better or worse, he isn’t really operating within the same statistical realities as any other player in the league, with averaging a triple-double only a part of the oddness. His ball dominance and box-score explosiveness have caused him to have as large a gravitationally warping effect on teammates’ style of play and production as anyone else in the NBA, up to and possibly including new teammate LeBron James.

As the best player on a team, Westbrook certainly raises the floor with his explosiveness, driving transition play and rim attacks, creating decent looks for teammates and showing a nose for the ball. However, his poor shooting and overly aggressive shot selection — over the last four seasons, Westbrook has an eFG% of 40.3 percent on shots outside of 10 feet despite taking over 14 attempts/100 possessions from those areas — as well as his penchant for gambling on defense also serve to lower the ceiling of those teams.

Over the last two seasons, building around another star with Westbrook has been equally confusing. In 2019-20, the Rockets didn’t work until they traded Clint Capela and quadrupled down on extreme small ball. Last season in Washington was a similar roller coaster, with a poor start followed by an epic late-season run but concluding with a meek postseason exit.

All of which is to say, I’m going to shrug my shoulders and drop Westbook here, for lack of any better idea of how and how much his talents and style move a team toward a title.

• I think the pendulum has swung much too far against both Ben Simmons andPascal Siakam in the public consciousness, both being defined much more by who they are not and what they cannot do. So let’s start there.

Neither player has demonstrated the ability to carry a team’s offense on his own. For the second straight season, Siakam was asked to do so by the Raptors, and while he made a good show of it in 2019-20, the jump shot that largely deserted him in the Orlando bubble did not much resurface in 2020-21. So it’s been pretty conclusively demonstrated that he can’t be the alpha scorer on a contending team. But it has been equally well-illustrated that, asked to be an opportunistic scorer and highly impactful defender — Siakam is 14th in dRAPM over the last three seasons — he can be an enormously positive presence as the second- or third-best player on a title team. He’s already done it!

In an informal poll of some league folks over the first few days of summer league, I learned there was some consensus that, ignoring contract status, Siakam would be more helpful to a team with genuine title aspirations than the forwards in Tier 4 such as Randle and Brandon Ingram, which is the entire point of this endeavor. As mentioned earlier, it is a given that players in this tier need to be sidekicks, not the main superhero, and that’s a role that, to this point, fits Siakam perfectly.

Simmons is a bit more extreme both in terms of the positives — he is quite possibly the most versatile and valuable perimeter defender in the league — and the negatives. You may have seen, heard or read that he struggles to shoot and at times avoids even attempting to score out of apparent skittishness over getting fouled. The pairing with Joel Embiid is highly imperfect, as the same spacing ability Simmons lacks is among the skills most needed to play with and off the most dominant post scorer in the game today. But the lack of fit between the two is far from total.

They make a formidable core for having a top defense, and when right and engaged, Simmons can drive transition offense about as well as anyone else in the league aside from Westbrook. Moreover, attempts to integrate the two stars into the same offensive concept could have been more creative over the last few years. I don’t know if the Sixers’ present roster will permit the sort of experimentation needed to allow the pair to fully succeed, so it is possible Simmons needs a fresh start somewhere else, but whoever trades for him could reap the benefit of unlocking his multitudinous talents in a more space-heavy system and context.

• Jaylen Brown dropping from 3B to 3C is more about a recalibration of the sub tiers than any sort of decline from Brown himself. In fact, Brown added five points of usage without the commensurate decline in efficiency that normally accompanies a role expansion of that magnitude. He also upped his playmaking substantially. Yet all of this occurred in a season in which Boston took a step backward. This isn’t to blame Brown for those issues, as they were both circ*mstantial and roster-driven.

But with Brown missing the playoffs last season, there are all the usual questions about the degree to which he could be an efficient, high-usage scorer against top playoff competition. A little bit similar to LaVine’s case, Brown needs to repeat the feat in a more normal year, and for a more functional Celtics team, to demonstrate the improvement necessary to place him in the next tier up of perimeter scorers.

Tier 3B: Players 24-30

Bradley Beal, Donovan Mitchelland Jamal Murrayrender this the landing spot for the group of scoring guards who are really, reallygood but not quite in the game’s elite group. For Beal and Mitchell, issue No. 1 is defense. Beal has graded out as one of the most negative defenders in the league essentially every season since John Wall’s cavalcade of injuries thrust him into the role of Washington’s best player. He ranks 751st of 755 players in three-year dRAPM. Mitchell has been better, but not by much, ranking 645th.

I also have to admit to something of an aesthetic bias against Mitchell over his tendency to completely short circuit Utah’s offense in high-pressure situations, as was seen in the Jazz’s second-round loss to the Clippers. When the long pull-ups go in, everything looks great. However, the volume of those attempts — in each of the last two playoff runs, Mitchell has averaged almost six more self-created FGA/100 in the playoffs than he did in the regular season — can more than occasionally freeze his teammates out of the offense. This is a fixable issue, as he is not the first star to need to figure out how to best pick his spots in the postseason.

Meanwhile, Murray is dropped down to 3B largely out of concern for whether he can retain his own explosiveness to the basket once he returns from the ACL injury he suffered so unfortunately late in the regular season.

• On some level, Mike Conley‘s 2021 All-Star selection could read as a career achievement award. After seemingly a decade spent as “the best player who has never,” finally earning that spot was wonderful to see. But this narrative sells Conley short. After a first season in Utah plagued by injury and adjustment following his time in Memphis, I was worried he was on the downside of his career. Turns out that once healthy and acclimated, he was just the spark Utah needed, adding a second shot creator alongside Mitchell to power the Jazz’s ‘blender’ offensive attack. After some of the worst efficiency marks of his career in 2019-20, including bottoming out to 45.2 percent eFG% on self-created attempts, he bounced back across the board including a career-high 41.2 percent from three. His importance was perhaps best demonstrated by how badly his absence affected Utah over the course of their second-round loss to the Clippers, as the Jazz were almost unrecognizable from the regular-season version we had seen on both ends of the floor without Conley providing the connective tissue which helped tie it all together.

• Aside from reigning MVP Nikola Jokic, Karl-Anthony Townsis the most complete offensive center in the game. He is one of the elite floor-spacing bigs in the league, hitting 41.3 percent of his career uncontested 3s. However, unlike most big-man shooters, Towns is nearly as adept when not left as open, hitting a robust 36.2 of his contested 3 attempts over his career. Meanwhile, among the 100 players with the most post-up touches since 2013-14, Towns ranks ninth in his team’s scoring efficiency on those plays, per Second Spectrum.

That Minnesota has largely failed to surround him with talent after trading Jimmy Butler away two seasons ago should not be held against him, though perhaps sending out a draft pick to pair him with D’Angelo Russell instead of Andrew Wiggins might be, as should his status as one of the least impactful defensive centers in the league, ranking 629th (of 755) in dRAPM over the past three seasons. But Towns also ranked 10th in oRAPM over that time period. If Anthony Edwards can build on his promising rookie campaign, the Wolves have the basis for one of the more dynamic offenses in the league over the coming seasons, and Towns’ versatility as a scorer and playmaker will be a major reason why.

• Ja Morant and Shai Gilgeous-Alexanderare two of the most promising guards in the game. In the 2020-21 regular season, Morant actually took a small step backward from his rookie year statistically, though some of that was likely related to the ankle injury he suffered in the third game of the season that saw him miss several weeks of play and may not have fully healed until the All-Star break. From his return until the break, he shot only 22.2 percent from 3, while after the break, he managed a much more robust 34.4 percent.

Speaking of shooting, this is the area most in need of improvement. He has made only 34.9 percent of his uncontested 3s and a ghastly 23.8 percent of his contested attempts, though the latter figure is probably skewed toward late-clock desperation attempts give how few contested 3s he actually takes. Also of concern is his 72.8 free-throw percentage.

In some ways, the free-throw percentage is more worrying, as focusing on shooting ignores just what makes Morant special. His ability to penetrate off the dribble, whether in isolation or pick-and-roll situations, is where he stands out. Somewhat unusually for a younger player with his kinetic burst and acceleration, Morant is already adept at changing speeds, sometimes slowing down and waiting for passing or driving lanes to develop while at other times going full pedal to the metal. Marry this ability to get to the cup with regularity with 80-plus percent from the line, and it becomes even more effective.

Morant also gets a boost by just how unguardable he was in his first foray into the playoffs. Though the success Reggie Jackson had against the Jazz a round later might take a little bit of the shine off it, nobody on Utah’s roster could stay in front of him at all, as he scored 30.2 points per game while shooting 75 percent at the rim against the best interior defender in the league in Rudy Gobert. And he did it as the only real shot-creator without the benefit of high-level spacers surrounding him.

Meanwhile, Gilgeous-Alexander has become so good that he was almost too good for Oklahoma City’s draft-focused goals a season ago, as he was shut down for the season in late March. In terms of what makes him so good, here’s the list of players with higher career efficiency than SGA’s 51.9 percent on self-created attempts at a volume of at least 15 FGA/100: LeBron James, James Harden, Kyrie Irving, Chris Paul, Luka Doncic, Damian Lillard. That’s the list. Being placed in that company over his career in a way sells Gilgeous-Alexander short. Consider the self-created volume and efficiency achieved by every player with at least 2,000 possessions played in 2020-21:

If shot creation is the most important skill in the game today, as I think it is, the fact that Gilgeous-Alexander is already an elite practitioner of that skill warrants having him placed this high almost on its own. There is still work to be done defensively and as a long-range shooter, but those additions will be to an already very high base of achievement.

Tier 3A: Players 20-23:

If you’ll permit me, here’s what I wrote about Jrue Holiday whenplacing him in Tier 3A a year ago:

For my money, the most underrated player in the NBA. Every time I have done this or a similar exercise over the last few years, Holiday jumps out as a production monster.

After being a simply massive part of the Bucks’ title run in his first season with the franchise as well as being an absolute defensive terror in Team USA’s gold medal performance in the just-completed Olympics, Holiday doesn’t need me to sing his praises as if he is some underappreciated gem. It has become obvious for everyone to see.

Holiday holds a strong claim to being the best defensive guard in the NBA. He was just named to the All-Defensive team for the third time, First Team for the second. For the three seasons for which NBA.com has detailed information on defensive matchups, no player (minimum 5,000 total possessions) has guarded opponents with higher average usage rates. Among players with above-average offensive loads themselves, he is one of only two players who has spent more than a third of his time on “primary” scorers with 25-plus usage rates (Dillon Brooks is the other). He has averaged at least two steals/100 possessions every season of his career.

He’s not merely a defender, ranking 19th in three-year RAPM, including 21st place in offensiveRAPM. This past season was the most efficient of his career, setting a career high in true shooting (59.0) alongside a career low in turnover rate — one of his main weaknesses as a player has been looseness with the ball with a career average of 4.1 turnovers/100. Though he is a very good offensive player, some of his limitations on that end are what keep in him Tier 3 instead of in the more exalted, All-NBA range of Tier 2.

He’s a solid but unspectacular shooter, 35.8 percent from 3 for his career. He’s been about average in terms of knocking down uncontested 3s (39.0 percent compared to league average of around 38.5) while slightly below on contested attempts (31.4 percent). He is not quite the off-the-dribble threat as the lead guards higher up the pyramid, and though he is a very good midrange shooter — 42.3 percent on 2-pointers outside of 10 feet — his shot selection can be adventurous at times, which explains why his eFG% has only been above league average twice in his career (including last year of course).

But digging too much into the numbers can obscure his fundamental ability to just make basketball plays. Single-game plus/minus is a treacherous stat to use well, but sometimes it can help paint a picture. In Game 4 of the NBA Finals, Holiday was 4-of-20 from the floor. Yet the Bucks outscored the Suns by eight with him on the floor for just under 44 minutes, a testament to his ability to influence the game. And of course, one of the indelible images of the just-completed Finals was Holiday snatching the ball from Devin Booker’s hands before lobbing to Antetokounmpo for a dunk on what was the key play in Game 5 and perhaps the entire series.

• My skepticism of Trae Younghas been well-established. However, at this point, it’s probably best to cut my losses, take the L and anoint him as the kind of archvillain (for fans of 29 franchises) the NBA genuinely needs.

Whether it was Nate McMillan’s coaching, the natural maturation and jelling of the Hawks’ roster, a reaction to being left out of the 2021 All-Star roster galvanizing him or most likely a combination of all three, Young started to rein in some of the excesses in his game that gave pause as to his overall effectiveness. They haven’t completely vanished, but the early-clock, zero-pass, 30-foot pull-ups have decreased in frequency.

While he still has a tendency to deactivate when off the ball, Young did show some willingness to use screens during the postseason. And speaking of the postseason, by far the biggest question prior to last season was whether his slight frame and, shall we say, foul-provocative game could stand up to the physical and competitive rigors of the playoffs. After Young led the Hawks to a blistering of the Knicks and a somewhat stunning upset of the Sixers, it’s safe to say those questions have been answered.

Whether Young can ascend into Tier 2 will depend on a number of smaller improvements. Can he continue to refine his shot selection? Will he find ways to be slightly less of a defensive liability than his 755th place ranking (of 755!) in three-year dRAPM suggests he has been? Can he become a more effective player off the ball to allow the talents around him, such as Kevin Huerter and John Collins, to shine a little more? Having learned my lesson, I’m no longer betting against him being able to do so.

• Devin Booker faces similar questions to Young defensively, as he ranked 743rd in dRAPM. The sample sizes are so small that individual defensive metrics are almost inherently unreliable for the playoffs, but observationally, he was more locked in during the postseason. For example, he had several good sequences of weakside help during the Finals when Phoenix changed its assignments to have Booker, rather than Chris Paul, be the player patrolling the baseline while (not) guarding P.J. Tucker.

Many, including me, were critical of his offensive approach in the Finals, where the Bucks’ scheme of guarding him one-on-one for the most part resulted in a lot of midrange jumpers. While Booker is an elitemidrange scorer, one of only a handful of players to hit more than 50 percent of their self-created 2-point jumpers last season, pushing him toward those shots and away from rim attacks (and attendant free throws drawn) and drive-and-kicks to teammates helped transform a great scorer into a just a pretty good one for that series:

In what was overall a spectacularly successful first playoff run, Booker can be forgiven for what amounts to a slight decision-making miscalibration in one series. It’s hard to prove statistically, but the ability to solve that kind of playoff puzzle based on past trials and errors is one of the reasons playoff experience tends to correlate with deeper postseason runs. One needs only to look to Booker’s Finals opponent, Antetokounmpo, to see an example of a player figuring out some of the defensive tactics that stymied him in earlier series in previous years.

As with Young, Booker has to make a number of small improvements to reach Tier 2. The first is finding offensive balance between shot creation and playmaking discussed above. It would also help if he became a little more reliable as a 3-point shooter, where despite his reputation in that area, Booker’s accuracy has been just OK, even controlling for the difficulty of his shot attempts (his 39.8 percent career mark on uncontested 3s is slightly above average but doesn’t really approach the elite status of the Currys, Robinsons and Porter Jr.’s of the world who are in the mid-40s or higher). The third is his clearest weakness: defense, where being a little more consistently competitive would go a long way. Those are the areas that separate Booker from the perimeter players in Tiers 2 and 1.

• Zion Williamson is literally without precedent in the modern NBA. I’ve put forth variations of this chart on multiple occasions, but it’s still absolutely staggering:

Williamson gets to the rim with more frequency than anyone else in recent history. Even with generous extrapolation of Shaquille O’Neal’s late-career shooting splits onto his early, pre-charted shot location career, Shaq had nothing close to the volume of Williamson’s rim attacks. All the more impressive is that Williamson has achieved this level of tectonic force despite every opponent knowing that’s where he wants to go, while New Orleans also lacks much in the way of the spacing threats who could open up the lane for Williamson.

Nor does it seem that he is merely a battering ram. As the season wore on, New Orleans increasingly ran its offense through Williamson. While he only averaged 1.6 assists per game over his first 10 games, by his final 10, that had more than doubled to 3.6.

One of the chief criticisms of Williamson — aside from defense, which was an issue up and down the Pelicans’ roster — is that all he does is take dunks and layups. To which I say, so what? The area around the rim is the most valuable real estate in the game, and if nobody can stop him from getting there, why should he feel the need to do anything else? Though until New Orleans makes the postseason, and Williamson is able to be similarly effective at piercing the paint at a defense fully schemed and prepared to deny those opportunities, there will remain some question as to whether such a straightforward attack is playoff-compatible. A berth in Tier 2 or higher awaits the answer as well.

Stay tuned tomorrow for Tier 2!

Related reading

Tier 4: LaMelo Ball, Julius Randle and more
Tier 5: Overview, dropouts from 2020 and more

(Photos by Jesse D. Garrabrant & Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images. Illustration by Wes McCabe/The Athletic)