Player ratings & letter grades
Why an A is rare and a C isn't an insult
Every player in Front Office Hoops has ratings under the hood, but you’ll never see a raw number. Instead, everything you look at — player pages, the roster screen, trade offers, the draft board — shows a letter grade. That’s a deliberate choice: numbers invite you to compare 81 vs. 82 and lose the plot. Letters tell you what you actually need to know: is this guy a starter, a bench piece, or a star.
The scale is anchored to real NBA archetypes, not a flat curve from 0 to 100. Here’s the full table:
| Grade | What it means |
|---|---|
| A+ | Generational — a true superstar |
| A | All-Star |
| A- | Borderline All-Star |
| B+ | Top-tier starter |
| B | Good starter |
| B- | Average NBA starter |
| C+ | Low-end starter / sixth man |
| C | Rotation player |
| C- | Solid bench |
| D+ | Deep bench |
| D | End-of-bench |
| D- | G-League / two-way talent |
| F | Below pro level |
Most of the table lives below the A tier, on purpose. The A tier is genuinely rare — you might have zero or one A-grade player on your entire roster most seasons. The B range covers the whole starter spectrum, from guys who make an All-NBA case to steady, unspectacular starting-caliber talent. And a C is a rotation player, not an insult — it means this person is good enough to play meaningful minutes in the league. Most rosters are built mostly out of Bs and Cs, with the occasional A or D mixed in. If you’re staring at a roster full of C-range players wondering if you’re bad at this, you’re not — that’s what a normal NBA roster actually looks like.
Eleven ratings make up a player’s game. Overall is the headline, but under it every player carries the same set of individual skills, each graded on the same letter scale:
| Rating | What it drives |
|---|---|
| Inside | Scoring at the rim — post moves, drives, finishing through traffic |
| Mid-range | The in-between game: pull-ups, floaters, baseline jumpers |
| 3-point | Shooting from deep — both accuracy and how much defenses respect it |
| Passing | Playmaking and assist creation; who your offense actually runs through |
| IQ | Decision-making everywhere: shot selection, fewer turnovers, being in the right spot |
| Defense | On-ball and team defense — contests, steals, making opponents’ nights hard |
| Rebounding | Ending possessions on one glass and extending them on the other |
| Speed | Quickness up and down the floor — transition play, drives, staying in front of guards |
| Strength | Physical battles: holding position inside, finishing through contact |
| Jumping | Vertical athleticism — blocks, boards above the rim, lob finishing |
| Endurance | How slowly a player tires; high-endurance players stay effective deep into games |
A player’s physical profile — height, weight, wingspan — layers on top of all of this: a long, tall player blocks and rebounds above what his ratings alone suggest, and a small guard pays for his quickness in the post.
A grade means the same thing at every position. An A in rebounding is elite rebounding, full stop — a point guard with that grade cleans the glass like a big does. What changes by position is how common a grade is (centers cluster at the top of the rebounding scale; passers cluster at point guard) and how much that skill matters to the player’s job — the game leans on different ratings for different roles, so a center’s inside and rebounding grades carry his value the way a point guard’s passing and IQ carry his. Rare combinations do exist, and they’re exactly as valuable as they sound: a genuinely elite-rebounding guard is a matchup problem, not a rounding error.
Potential is real — and playing time is its fuel. Every young player has a ceiling separate from where they are today, and — like current ability — it’s never shown as a number. What decides whether a prospect actually reaches that ceiling, more than anything else, is minutes. Young players grow toward their potential by playing real rotation minutes; a talented prospect buried at the end of the bench develops slowly, and if he stays buried past his earliest seasons, the ceiling itself starts to quietly shrink. That’s the answer to most “whatever happened to that guy?” stories — the talent was real, the opportunity never came. Age sets the arc around it: players improve through their twenties, peak in their late twenties, and decline sets in during their early thirties (the true greats hold on a little longer).
Scouting the ceiling. For players still early in their careers, you’ll sometimes see a scouted upside chip: a quick, low-fidelity read on how much room a player has to grow. You’ll run into these on the draft board, among young free agents, on the trading block, and on a young player’s own page — the spots where “how good could this become” actually matters for a decision you’re about to make. Once a player gets older, the chip goes away — by then, what you see on the court is the answer.
The result is a rating system that reads like a scout’s notebook instead of a spreadsheet: quick to scan, hard to over-optimize, and honest about the fact that most of the league is good-not-great. That’s where the real GM decisions live — not in chasing the one A+ prospect, but in building a rotation full of solid Bs and Cs who fit together.