Team depth · talent ladder
How deep is your team, really?
This version follows his tiers, his two ratings (LEBRON and DARKO) and his over-replacement or raw-rate values, then adds grouped positions, a contract view (what each player costs, what each tier cost the team, how each contract came about, what is committed), an optimization score, and a league-wide look at how winning teams spend.
Ladder
Team read
About this view
Top-ten drop-off
Player grade by rank within the team, against the league average at each rank. The band is the middle half of teams.
Stars versus depth
Sum of the top five players' grades against players six to ten. Click a dot to open that team.
Best player by position
Team's best qualified grade in each column of the ladder, against the league average.
Payroll by tier
Commitments by tier
How each tier was built
What each tier costs
League-median salary of each tier as a share of that season's cap, so seasons compare. The line marks the season shown. Players with no salary on file are left out.
Cost of the ladder
Who wins, and how they spend
Every team's end-of-season roster, 2015-16 onward, grouped by how far the team got. Each bar is the average team in that group. The team groups study on the salary-distribution page asks a related question from payroll shape, age and rookie share (2017-18 onward).
League table
Players per tier for every team, then spending against the tier prices (cap points) and the optimization score: value over replacement bought per 10% of the cap, among players with both a value and a salary on file, ranked across teams from 0 to 100. It always uses over-replacement value for the chosen rating, so it reads the same in either Value mode. Cheap rookie-scale stars and injured seasons swing it, so treat it as cost efficiency, not a verdict on the front office. Click a header to sort and a row to open the team.
Method
From the original (Shamit Dua, In The N.O.): the seven tiers and their sizes, ranking each player league-wide and within his position and averaging the two percentiles, the position-by-tier layout, the drop-off and stars-versus-depth views, the LEBRON and DARKO ratings, and the two ways to value a season: rating above replacement (set at -1.0, about the ninth or tenth man on a .500 team) times minutes, or the raw per-100-possession rate. The current-season blend and the end-of-season roster rule are his too. Added here: grouped positions, cap share on each player, payroll by tier, the tier price list, cost of the ladder and the optimization score, future commitments and option years, how each contract was acquired, a league-wide look at champions' spending, and every season on a shared scale. Tiers always rank within the five listed positions, so the grouped view only changes how the grid is drawn.
Production, not potential: a tier describes the season shown, not what a player will do next. Players are listed at their end-of-season team and one position. Salary and cap share come from the same player sheet and are missing for some players, so payroll totals are partial where noted. The 2026-27 view builds rosters from our Spotrac salary export (his come from Basketball-Reference), so a few players can differ. Past seasons use his end-of-season roster rule; he places a few players traded while injured by hand, which we cannot.