Tiering the Rockets early season performances

The season is very much still in it’s juvenile stage, but I thought it would be fun to visualize how the Houston Rockets roster stacks up six games in. In ranking each player’s performance, I headed over to TierMaker to see how everyone is living up to expectations.

Pictured above are the five tiers ranking performance with ‘S’ being the highest and ‘D’ being the lowest. To reiterate, this tier is more so based on relative performance rather than who is the overall best player on the team.

A sixth ‘N/A’ tier was added to include players such as Tari Eason and Victor Oladipo who haven’t played this season due to injury. I also added players to this row if they haven’t seen the court or have only made garbage time appearances. It wouldn’t feel fair to hold mop-up duty against them considering they’ve only had a few minutes to make an impact.

Seeing Dillon Brooks top this list might look absurd to the casual viewer, but it’s no surprise to us as he’s been a star in his role so far. Again, this is all relative. That is why Jabari Smith Jr. and Jalen Green were placed in the ‘C’ tier. While they have had better outings as of recently, we still expect to see way more consistency from two guys that need to live up to their top of the draft billing.

Placing Alperen Sengun in the ‘A’ tier may look weird because I think he’s just scraping the surface, but I also didn’t think he’d be the team’s leading scorer at this point. Fred VanVleet anchors the ‘B’ tier with a couple of bench players who are doing pretty much what I expected of them in limited roles.

Overall, this seems like a fair starting point given the small sample size of games. I’ll give the season some time to breathe before the next update and hopefully we see the bulk of the roster level up in the time that passes.