With the 2025-26 NBA regular season complete, The Athletic presents its end-of-season NBA Player Tiers, a look at determining and slotting the top 125 players in the league.These are not rankings but more so a hard look at the value of the league’s best players, and the project is a subjective exercise. My evaluation process differs from that of my former colleague Seth Partnow, though this version is inspired by the foundation he built. Because of that subjectivity, I intended to resist creating an echo chamber. There were players I liked that my selected network wasn’t nearly as high on, while there were others I was encouraged to reconsider for inclusion or placement.When Seth started this, he asked: What do we have? What do we need? What do we have to do to get there?My question is simple: How close is this player to helping you get to winning — especially a championship?I’m retaining the same five tiers as 2025, my first season with this project, with tweaks to the sub-tiers:Putting players in tiers is an acknowledgment that similar players are generally a product of preference, fit and situation, though it’s impossible to fully remove the factors around a player’s environment to get to where that player’s place in the league is in a vacuum.Many factors go into how a player is valued. Is the team a contender, a pretender or rebuilding? Is the player a guard, a wing or a big? Basketball is a team game with so many different skill sets and body types throughout rosters and lineups — and yet, we are here evaluating individuals.How it worksThe methodology for this project can be broken down into three parts.Part 1: Impact in minutes played. I considered every player in the NBA who is playing at least 30 minutes per game, and I excluded all players who did not play 20 minutes per game this season. Of the players who played at least 10 games this season: