Karl-Anthony Towns has been labeled a “sub-elite” big in The Athletic‘s annual NBA Player Tiers Project, which categorizes the top 125 players in the NBA and groups them from solid starters to the elite of the elite and everything in between.
Towns’s ranking doesn’t appear to have anything to do with the calf injury that kept him out of 52 games last season. Instead, the he was placed in the Tier4B category with the likes of Brook Lopez, Nic Claxton, Jarrett Allen and Myles Turner. players who are essentially a liability one offense or defense.
The writer of the story, Seth Partnow, who previously worked as the director of basketball research for the Milwaukee Bucks, suggests that Towns, Lopez, Claxton, Allen and Turner are “sub-elite” bigs because they are liabilities on offense or defense.
The importance for floor spacing, the rise of switching and the increased ability of teams to hunt mismatches in the form of “one-position” defenders has made playing two bigs a relative rarity, with pure “five-out” systems getting plenty of looks as well.
Lopez was a defensive player of the year finalist and averaged 15.9 points while hitting 136 3-pointers. No center made more threes than Lopez last season, but Partnow claims “This is how NBA front offices assess player value across the league when building their teams.”
Towns is certainly an elite scoring big, though his defense leaves something to be desired and is fairly criticized as a liability. But being put in the same boat as Claxton, Allen and Turner is very debatable, especially considering there’s a Tier4A category that includes Andrew Wiggins and Derrick White.
Jaden McDaniels and Mike Conley are both included in Tier 5, which consists of “promising youngsters on the way up” and “stars still finding ways ton contribute at a moderately high level later in their careers.”
What’s interesting is that Rudy Gobert’s name hasn’t popped up in Tier 5 or 4. Since Tiers 3, 2 and 1 haven’t been unveiled, the only options are that Gobert’s defense is so good that he’s level or two higher than Towns or he was left off the list completely.
It’s a good bet that Anthony Edwards will be included in Tier 2 or 3, but we’ll have to wait to find out as the tiers are released in the coming days.
