For four years now, one of the preeminent advanced stats guys in the NBA, Seth Partnow, has placed the NBA’s best players into tiers for TheAthletic.com. Partnow, a senior writer for TheAthletic, is the Director of North American Sports for sports data leader StatsBomb, was previously the Director of Basketball Analytics with the Milwaukee Bucks, wrote the bestseller “The Midrange Theory”, and once appeared on the Solar Panel podcast.
He uses tiers for the purposes of grouping the top players by their impact to a playoff team. The less the impact on playoff outcomes, the wider the tier.