Top 125 Player list with Sengun Rockets franchise Player

Honestly I'm tired of how the.media treats Green. It's ****ing stupid.

 

It's almost like they still had a bunch of Harden hate sitting on a shelf and they didn't know what to do with it so they just shifted their focus to Jalen.

I've never seen a player get constantly downplayed as much as Jalen does, they talk about him like he's averaging 3 points per game or some ****

 

praising players like Giddey while trashing Harden as a chucker when he has a worse ts%.

It's stupid. No context. No analysis. Stare at fg% and rockets record and call it a day.

It's th Devin Booker treatment.

 

I agree, I am so heppy he is a Rocket. Sadly thou, people are standing in the way of his greatness. Mainly Silas. Silas has made it his life's purpose to hurt Sengun and that hurts all of us. He is an enemy of heppynes.....

 

What makes it worse is they tried to tell us that Stephen Silas is a NICE GUY when in reality he is a menace who should probably be locked up in a mental institution for abject cruelty and dehumanising behaviours

 

Silas is an ambitious man, he would somehow find a way out. He craves authority and power, he wants to rule Sengun.. He wants to decide Sengun's fate and future. If Sengun succeeds he wants to be the reason why and if Sengun fails he wants to be the reason why. He thirsts control over him. Only Tilman can help by firing Silas. There he will be powerless over Sengun's triple doubles.

 

another garbage thread by a useless SOF trying desperately to prop up their baby daddy

 

To be honest, your choice of words would indicate yourself as being the biased and irrational fan

 

The Athletic is releasing their 2023-24 player tiers, starting with Tier 5 today.

Three Rockets: Dillon Brooks, Alperen Sengun & Jalen Green(last 5 in)

“As usual, limiting myself to 125 players meant some close calls with the “First Five Out:” Joe Harris, Bobby Portis, Christian Wood, Dorian Finney-Smith and Terance Mann. By comparison, my last five in were Grant Williams, Gary Payton II, Jaden McDaniels, Jalen Green and Markelle Fultz.”

Spoiler

Spoiler: Minutiae, explanation

https://theathletic.com/4747170/2023/08/14/nba-player-tiers-klay-thompson-jordan-poole/

…

As I’ve discussed in more detail in the past editions of the NBA Player Tiers Project (see here, here and here), somewhere between 125 and 150 players on average perform at a level consistent with adding measurable championship equity to their teams in any given season. These 125 to 150 players — which we limit to a Top 125 for the sake of year-to-year uniformity — can be broken down somewhat naturally into tranches of production that match the salary structure of the 2017 collective bargaining agreement (and largely persists into the 2023 version).

•Somewhere between three and seven players per season perform at a level commensurate with the 35 percent “individual supermax” contract.
•A further 10 to 15 perform at a level justifying the 30 percent veteran max
•20 to 25 more earn the 25 percent rookie max
•35 to 45 produce at a level matching a contract at 20 percent of the cap
•40 to 60 fill it producing at the 15 percent level and up

The levels are inclusive, so the first two groups — Tiers 1 and 2 — typically make up the top 20 players in the league, give or take.

I don’t apply this research literally, as my version of player tiers is more concerned with playoff competitiveness than regular-season win accumulation. While the two are often related, raw production value will underrate a player such as Kawhi Leonard, who isn’t going to rack up 3,000 minutes or anything close even without an acute injury. On the other hand, Julius Randle, who finished 17th (Tier 2 range) in the league in “EPM Wins” — more on EPM in a second — will be ranked lower because that figure had more to do with him finishing fifth in the league in total minutes than his 37th place finish in the per possession impact version of EPM.

So let’s make some assumptions explicit:

The tiers are about championship equity for 2024

These are not intended as rankings for a “franchise redraft” exercise, nor are they meant to represent trade value. Rather, the specific question being asked is: Assuming the player is healthy and paired with competitive teammates, which players provide the most value toward winning a title?

These tiers are largely contract agnostic

Especially considering that contention-level teams are less beholden to “value for contract” than building teams, as they already have the guys in the building and the CBA almost requires teams to pay/overpay to retain their top players. This exercise is meant to focus much more on the player’s on-court production relative to other players rather than to his contract.

Contract status does factor in slightly when dealing with certain team-building realities around lower-level stars. Jerami Grant is one of the better examples of this right now. On a contention-level team, he would be much more effective, I think, in something more akin to his role for the 2019-20 Nuggets than the primary/secondary offensive option type he has been in since. But practically speaking, he makes way too much money to be a “role player” anymore.

Rising sophomores get a slight “player development” bump

NBA rookies very strongly tend to be negative-impact players. Much of that, even for the highest-level prospects, is simply because of them figuring out what does and doesn’t work at NBA speed and against NBA athleticism. To that end, I largely assume the “What the hell is going on here?” factor will be absent in their second year in the league and (slightly) adjust my prediction for their performance upward from what a pure analysis of their rookie season might suggest.

Role matters

A point of contention every year with this project is the point at which “elite role player” types start to interact with players who are competent but sub-elite primary/secondary options. It’s a difficult conundrum because this inflection point in player value raises questions for which we don’t have defined answers.

Since Brandon Ingram has been a focus of this discussion in the past, I think it’s safe to say that, in any realistic construction, a team isn’t a legit contender if someone at the level of Ingram is its best player. Would placing Ingram in a third/fourth option role prevent him from doing the things that make him Brandon Ingram, or could he slide seamlessly into a supporting role on a stronger team?

Certainly we have seen recent success stories, with Andrew Wiggins and Aaron Gordon as prime examples of players who flourished in “superstar role player” contexts. But there are plenty of guys for whom the transition has been less smooth, even if their skill set appears amenable to a more supporting role. It took Carmelo Anthony several seasons to accept and adapt to a smaller role, and by the time he had, his late-career athleticism had diminished to the point where he was no longer a real impact player.

To continue with Ingram: While he might or might not be able to make that adaptation, I know Mikal Bridges can perform at that “superstar role player” level because we saw it for several seasons running with the Suns prior to his trade to Brooklyn. He still must prove he can actually take the next step to becoming a quality primary/secondary option for a top team, but he has already demonstrated that if he must take a step back into 3-and-D territory, he will likely excel. For purposes of this exercise, I’ll gladly take that certainty over the unknown of how Ingram might adjust in the opposite direction.

Positional skill set matters

Certain combinations of position group and skill set can make a player easier or harder to build around. For example, poor defensive centers or non-shooting guards create limitations in terms of constructing the rest of the roster. As one way to think about players in higher tiers is their ability to provide more team-building margin for error, reducing those margins and the pool of players who satisfy those requirements should naturally push a player down. Conversely, players with positionally unusual skills offer a big bonus. For example, a big wing who can effectively fill traditional point guard offensive responsibilities allows for a wider range of options in the backcourt, a benefit we’ve seen interact with the use of players such as Alex Caruso or Gary Payton II to emphasize strengths and mitigate weaknesses.

Players are not ranked within sub-tiers

The main reason I prefer tiers to rankings is that so much of basketball ability is contextual, even for the very top players. There are groups of players for whom the question of “Who is the best?” requires knowing who else is on the team to answer. Though each of Tiers 1-4 is divided into sub-tiers representing small differences — in most instances, most teams should slightly prefer a Tier 3A guy to a Tier 3B performer — the differences in player ability across a sub-tier are smaller than the differences in how varying team contexts will affect their performance and impact. The order within each sub-tier is a “tiebreak” based on prior season tiering rather than a substantive ranking.

The tiers are intentionally “sticky”

I would much rather be a year too late in anointing a player than a year early for one who never ends up really arriving. Similarly, I don’t want to be too reactive to a career year or a particularly abject playoff series, which could lead to wild year-to-year swings.

Advanced metrics were the starting point but not the end of the analysis

Rather than start from a blank sheet of paper, I’ve always found it helpful to use a few of the better player impact models to provide a point of departure for the tiers. But I am not beholden to those numbers for a few reasons.

First, even the best player value model is context-dependent. These metrics are not answering the question: “How good is this player?” Rather, it is: “How effective was this player in the role and context in which he played?” The tiers are meant to be as context-independent as possible, so some degree of adjustments up or down for players who are in particularly harsh or unkind situations is appropriate.

Second, I’ll repeat what I said above that the tiers are more about championship fitness, meaning playoff competitiveness is relatively more important than regular-season production. Pretty much any single number metric worth using is built on top of regular-season data.

Finally, there is the issue of time frame. One season is not a long time, even for the best of metrics, so I’d much rather use a multi-season sample. But sometimes that means some of the data in the model is a little stale for players near the beginning or ends of their careers, or for someone who experienced a substantial shift in role mid-career. Part of the reason I have Luka Dončić rated more highly than a strict “rank by chosen metrics” approach would allow is that he’s on the upslope of his career. Similarly, while Mike Conley has had wonderful late-career staying power, he’s much closer to the end than the start.

 

Spoiler

Those preliminaries out of the way, let’s get to Tier 5.

This tier is a mixture of promising youngsters on the way up (Bennedict Mathurin and Walker Kessler, for example), stars still finding ways to contribute at a moderately high level later in their careers (such as Klay Thompson and Kyle Lowry) and a group of excellent-but-not-quite-elite role players (including Quentin Grimes, De’Anthony Melton and Tobias Harris).

As usual, limiting myself to 125 players meant some close calls with the “First Five Out:” Joe Harris, Bobby Portis, Christian Wood, Dorian Finney-Smith and Terance Mann. By comparison, my last five in were Grant Williams, Gary Payton II, Jaden McDaniels, Jalen Green and Markelle Fultz.

We’ll be revealing a new tier each day. The metrics included on each player card are:

•A year-by-year look at where they have landed in the previous three installments.

•Minutes Per Win — an estimate based on a blend of three seasons of Estimated Plus/Minus (thanks to Taylor Snarr of DunksAndThrees.com for letting me use and abuse his metric) and the three-season version of NBAShotCharts.com’s RAPM model. An average NBA player will “create” a win about every 485-490 minutes or so — there are 480 minutes played between both teams in a regulation game, and factoring in overtime periods adds a little to that number.

•An estimated “Salary Production” value assuming the player is on the floor for 2,500 – 2,000 – 1,500 minutes played. This is intended to give a range of production rather than a point estimate, as predicting minute distribution ahead of a season is always a pain and tends to have large margins of error. The estimated range assumes the level of play indicated by Minutes Per Win. It is worth noting that many, especially role-players, won’t reach the same level in 32 minutes per game as they might in 25. This is intended to give a range of production rather than a point estimate, as predicting minute distribution ahead of a season is always a pain and frequently inaccurate. In contests for predicting season win totals based on player value models, differentiating between the best approaches is as much a determination of which model creator had the most accurate guess at minute distributions as it is to which approach more accurately measured and predicted player impact.

•3-Year Average EPM and 3-Year RAPM: Estimated Plus/Minus is a single year metric, but I wanted to look at multiple years, so this is simply the minutes-weighted average of the three individual seasons EPM value for each player. Conversely, the three-year Regularized Adjusted Plus-Minus (RAPM) model is run over the 2020-21 to 2022-23 regular seasons in a single go, so it estimates player impact across the three seasons. The main difference between EPM and RAPM is that RAPM is simply an attempt to control for teammates and opponents without reference to any other inputs, whereas EPM uses box score and other statistical information to attempt to assign credit more precisely. Over several seasons since its introduction, EPM has proven to be one of, if not, the most accurate of publicly available player value models. However, the statistical “prior” mentioned above is a bit of a black box if one doesn’t have the actual recipe. Therefore, I choose to balance it out a little with the more easily explainable, though more naive, RAPM.

The four metrics mentioned above are accompanied by a ranking (out of 497) among all qualifying players in the sample.

Tier 5A:
Klay Thompson | WARRIORS
Al Horford | CELTICS
Scottie Barnes | RAPTORS
Kyle Lowry | HEAT
Malcolm Brogdon | CELTICS
Tobias Harris | 76ERS
Jonas Valanciunas | PELICANS
Dillon Brooks | ROCKETS
De'Andre Hunter | HAWKS
Gary Trent Jr. | RAPTORS
Anfernee Simons | TRAIL BLAZERS
Herbert Jones | PELICANS
Jordan Poole | WIZARDS
Mike Conley | TIMBERWOLVES
Russell Westbrook | CLIPPERS
Nikola Vucevic | BULLS
Clint Capela | HAWKS
Bogdan Bogdanovic | HAWKS
Caris LeVert | CAVALIERS
Spencer Dinwiddie | NETS
D'Angelo Russell | LAKERS
Immanuel Quickley | KNICKS
Kevin Huerter | KINGS
Norman Powell | CLIPPERS
P.J. Washington | HORNETS
Terry Rozier | HORNETS
Cameron Johnson | NETS
Jakob Poeltl | RAPTORS
Keldon Johnson | SPURS
Kevon Looney | WARRIORS
Luguentz Dort | THUNDER
Quentin Grimes | KNICKS
RJ Barrett | KNICKS
Alperen Sengun | ROCKETS
Bennedict Mathurin | PACERS
De'Anthony Melton | 76ERS
Trey Murphy III | PELICANS
Walker Kessler | JAZZ
Malik Monk | KINGS
Ivica Zubac | CLIPPERS
Grant Williams | MAVERICKS
Gary Payton II | WARRIORS
Jaden McDaniels | TIMBERWOLVES
Jalen Green | ROCKETS
Markelle Fultz | MAGIC

 

102 is our New Franchise Number.

 

Sengün has mixed blood of many races......

 

https://theathletic.com/4768667/2023/08/15/nba-player-tiers-victor-wembanyama/



Tier 4A
Chris Paul | WARRIORS
CJ McCollum | PELICANS
Brandon Ingram | PELICANS
Domantas Sabonis | KINGS
O.G. Anunoby | RAPTORS
Andrew Wiggins | WARRIORS
Robert Williams III | CELTICS
Darius Garland | CAVALIERS
Desmond Bane | GRIZZLIES
Evan Mobley | CAVALIERS
Kristaps Porzingis | CELTICS
Aaron Gordon | NUGGETS
Michael Porter Jr. | NUGGETS
Derrick White | CELTICS
Paolo Banchero | MAGIC

Tier 4A: 40-54
A-plus role players
Aaron Gordon, Andrew Wiggins, O.G. Anunoby, Derrick White

Small guards
Chris Paul, CJ McCollum, Darius Garland

Elite shooters
Michael Porter Jr., Desmond Bane, Kristaps Porziņģis

High hopes
Evan Mobley, Paolo Banchero

Hard to build around
Brandon Ingram, Domantas Sabonis

Tier 4B
Karl-Anthony Towns | TIMBERWOLVES
Fred VanVleet | ROCKETS
Jarrett Allen | CAVALIERS
Dejounte Murray | HAWKS
Tyrese Maxey | 76ERS
Myles Turner | PACERS
Brook Lopez | BUCKS
Julius Randle | KNICKS
Franz Wagner | MAGIC
Nic Claxton | NETS
Austin Reaves | LAKERS
Victor Wembanyama | SPURS

Tier 4B: 55-66
‘The One’
Victor Wembanyama

B-plus bigs
Brook Lopez, Myles Turner, Nic Claxton, Jarrett Allen, Karl-Anthony Towns

B-plus guards
Austin Reaves, Fred VanVleet, Tyrese Maxey, Dejounte Murray

The NBA is awash with backcourt talent right now. The flipside of there being so many good playmakers is that the level of competition is always high, especially in the postseason. This is a group that can compete with many of the best backcourt players in the league, but the goal is playing to a draw rather than expecting to create an edge.

Is this damning with faint praise? Perhaps. But depending on how we define positions, there are about 25 guards ahead of this group, so putting them in the Top 60 to 70 is simply math.

Grab bag
Franz Wagner
Julius Randle

Tier 4C
Zach LaVine | BULLS
Marcus Smart | GRIZZLIES
Deandre Ayton | SUNS
Jerami Grant | TRAIL BLAZERS
John Collins | JAZZ
Tyler Herro | HEAT
Cade Cunningham | PISTONS
Josh Giddey | THUNDER
Bojan Bogdanovic | PISTONS
Kentavious Caldwell-Pope | NUGGETS
Alex Caruso | BULLS
Bruce Brown | PACERS
Jalen Williams | THUNDER
Keegan Murray | KINGS

Tier 4C: 67-80
Impact role players
Marcus Smart, Bruce Brown, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Alex Caruso

Youths
Cade Cunningham, Josh Giddey, Jalen Williams, Keegan Murray

Numbers over impact
Jerami Grant, Tyler Herro, Bojan Bogdanović, Zach LaVine, Deandre Ayton, John Collins

 

All this fuss about Tier 4......display all tiers.

 

People spend a lot of time compiling these worthless lists, I suppose with the computer flagged with a post-it note stating "no Pornhub!"

So many players benefit from coaching and great teammates. The Rockets have been treading water so long they probably don't entirely know what they have anyway.

 

Mobley is so overrated, i'd like to see him on the worst team in the league for a few years and see what the perception of him is then....

 

How come SGA lower than Kawhi and Damian in an "UPDATED" list?

 

I hate Bill Simmons.

Just wanted to get that off my chest.

Jalen Green is going to shut up a lot of people this year. Udoka is going to unleash his beast mode.

 

So the Number 102 saved orphans....woot I am missing.....