NBA Reliability Tiers: Paul George, Karl-Anthony Towns and can Ja Morant get back to All-Stardom?

Welcome to The Athletic’s NBA Reliability Tiers, in which we measure the All-NBA status of the 49 All-Stars during the last three seasons and weigh how much those stars play in the regular season. Each day we have a new tier. We introduced the methodology with Tier 5. We continued with Tier 4. This is Tier 3. 

Welcome to the middle of the pack. All of these players in Tier 3 have been undisputed top options for their teams. Some of them are still exploring that space and could be All-NBA players at some point of their burgeoning careers.

On the other hand, many of the players in this group have shown what it takes to be an All-NBA performer at some point recently in their careers and can be dangerous. But their ability to stay on the floor has been a severe issue as of late. Maybe you can rely on these players to take over consistently, but this group features some of the most injury-prone stars in the league.

The Reliability Tiers prioritize the most recent All-Star and All-NBA selections, with a higher rank given to the players who are more likely to be on the floor. This is not a ranking of who is better in terms of pure ability. There are players in this tier that if we were doing a power ranking of players in a vacuum, the young guys like Paolo Banchero or Scottie Barnes would likely be down the list, while players such as Jimmy Butler and Anthony Davis would be valued as top-20 players.

Tonight, the Milwaukee Bucks and Philadelphia 76ers will open up against one another on national television, followed by the LA Clippers hosting the Phoenix Suns at the new Intuit Dome, a rematch of the 2021 Western Conference finals. Paul George is at the centerpiece of both games, even though he won’t be playing in either.

This won’t be a rehashing of Damian Lillard’s retort to George that the latter “keep switching teams… running from the grind.” Nonetheless, Bucks-76ers would have been an interesting spot to see how George and Lillard would have battled, especially with Lillard trying to re-establish All-NBA status with former 76ers and Clippers head coach Doc Rivers. Lillard’s struggles staying healthy, especially for a declining Portland team, played a role in him changing teams.

But George won’t be available for a season opener for the first time since 2019, when he was recovering from offseason shoulder surgeries. George recently suffered a non-contact knee injury in the preseason, and while it is only a bone bruise, it will cost him the first week of the season with his new team. While George bounced back to All-NBA status after Rivers was fired, in a season that ended with the only Clippers appearance in a conference finals, he has struggled with availability ever since.

A common narrative for NBA observers in the wake of George leaving the Clippers for Philadelphia is that the Clippers should have kept George over Kawhi Leonard because of George being more likely to be available. It is true that George has been more available than Leonard over the last three seasons and has been able to contribute more often as a result. George was the All-Star selection representing the Clippers in 2023, while Leonard got off to a slow and mostly absent start due to his challenges returning from a torn ACL suffered in 2021.

Unfortunately for George and the Clippers, George’s increased availability compared to Leonard is only a relative one. George only averaged 13.7 more games played per season than Leonard over the last three seasons, and that was without a major surgery sidelining George for an entire campaign like Leonard. George was needed the most during the 2021-22 season when Leonard was recovering, but when Jusuf Nurkić fell on George’s arm in an early December game, it left the Clippers without either of their stars for more than half of the year.

The following season, George played more than Leonard and earned an All-Star selection, but George’s misfortune continued when Luguentz Dort crashed into George’s knee a few weeks before the playoffs. The resulting injury was a severe sprain, one that didn’t require surgery, but left George unable to participate in the postseason for the second year in a row.

Last season was the biggest paradox of balancing George’s ability with his availability. On one hand, George didn’t miss a single game until Dec. 14, his longest stretch of games to start a season since joining the Clippers. George never missed more than two games in a row, and he played in 74 games, his most in five years.

But the Clippers believed that taking the ball out of George’s hands on one end of the floor and not having him be a primary point-of-attack defender on the other end was key to keeping George healthy. George’s touches decreased sharply, going from 68.8 per game in 2021 when Clippers head coach Tyronn Lue essentially made George the primary playmaker, to 75.4 touches per game in the 2021-22 season without Leonard, to 56.8 per game last season with the Clippers having future Hall of Famers James Harden and Russell Westbrook as point guards.

“We had a strategy in place that, you know, we didn’t want to get him worn down throughout the course of the season,” Lue said in March about limiting George’s on-ball role. “Him having to make every play in the pick-and-roll and hitting the ground and getting to the free-throw line. We wanted James to have that responsibility, because James was great in it. And we talked about the last 20 games, putting the ball back in PG’s hands so he can get used to it. So when we get to the playoffs, we know exactly what we want to do.”

The good news is that George played in his first postseason in three years this past spring. Leonard was not at full strength for the two games he was able to play, while George was healthy for all six of the Clippers’ Western Conference quarterfinals series loss to the eventual NBA finalist Dallas Mavericks. But George was not able to be the same player he was in the 2021 postseason without Leonard.

That is what is facing many of the players in this tier. First, can they be available enough, especially in consecutive years? And second, are they capable of an All-NBA appearance in 2025? Can they be that guy consistently? Some players are off to more convincing starts than others.

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb: The Athletic; Photos: Stephen Gosling / NBAE, Charlie Neibergall / Associated Press, Joe Murphy / NBAE via Getty Images)