About

Every grade in this game is defensible, and where it isn't, we say so on this page.

What the pool is

293 player-team stints across all 30 franchises — roughly ten per team, drawn from each franchise's all-time scoring leaders. A player appears once per team he played for, and each entry covers his best four-season stretch there.

That's why there's no separate "era" selector: the stint is the era. Thunder Durant, Warriors Durant and Suns Durant are three different steals with three different grade sets, and the years come along for free.

Where the grades come from

Each of the nine attributes is derived from real statistics:

Raw numbers are normalised against the league context of the seasons in question, then ranked across the whole pool and mapped onto the ladder with a fixed rarity distribution. That last step is what keeps S rare no matter how the underlying numbers drift — roughly the top 1% of the pool in any attribute.

Why Handle isn't just turnovers

Raw turnover rate is a trap. It rewards low-usage off-ball shooters who never dribble and punishes the players whose handle is exactly what lets them carry a 35% usage load. So Handle is graded on turnover economy — your rate against what your usage predicts — plus credit for sustaining that load at all. Without this correction, Klay Thompson graded out as an elite handler and James Harden as a poor one.

The 1997 problem

Shot-location tracking only begins in the 1996–97 season. Before that, nobody recorded where a shot was taken from — which means Finishing and Midrange cannot be derived at all for Jordan's Bulls peak, or Magic, Bird, Kareem, Wilt, or anyone else from the game's first fifty years. Usage and turnover rate go back only to the mid-1970s.

Two things fill that gap:

• Reconstruction. For most pre-1997 players, the missing attributes are estimated from what every era does record, using the reasoning a scout would apply to a box score: a centre shooting a high two-point percentage with a high foul rate is finishing at the rim, while a guard shooting a high percentage with a low foul rate is living in the midrange, because he isn't getting to the basket.
• Hand grading. 78 stints carry manual grades — every marquee legend, plus the pre-1974 players for whom even the reconstruction has nothing to work from.

Reconstructed and measured grades are ranked separately, never pooled together, because they sit on completely different numeric scales.

Known limits

• Some attributes have no clean statistical proxy in any era. Shot Creation before play-by-play data is an informed estimate, not a measurement.
• Franchise strength is wildly uneven, and we haven't flattened it. Spinning the Lakers is not the same as spinning Charlotte, and a weak franchise is allowed to be a dead spin — that risk is what makes a good spin worth something.
• Minutes per game have fallen league-wide, so modern players grade lower on Stamina than their durability alone would suggest.
• Grades are relative to this pool of all-time scorers, not to the league. A C here is a real NBA scorer.

The simulation

The final score isn't a weighted average of your grades — it's a possession-level simulation of a single game, run quarter by quarter, so that a build with weak Stamina genuinely fades in the fourth and elite Foul Drawing paired with poor Free Throws genuinely leaves points on the floor. It was tuned against tens of thousands of simulated runs so that a perfect 100 stays rare: roughly one in 480 for skilled play.

Data

Player statistics come from publicly available historical records. This is an independent fan project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the NBA, any team, or any player. If you spot a grade that looks wrong, it probably is — the method has known soft spots and they're listed above.