Here’s the thing with shooting guards – there just aren’t too many of them worth having. When we were splitting up people into positions to tier them, we used ESPN’s positions, where it seemed like the ground rules, basically, were that players qualified at their “biggest” position, except for PG’s. So FC’s were treated as centers, F’s were power forwards, GF’s were small forwards, and G’s were point guards. So while there are a lot of good players who qualify at SG, the thing is that most of them also qualify elsewhere, and that’s where they went. For example, guys like Dwyane Wade and Joe Johnson, they also qualify at PG, so they are treated as PG. Other top picks like Paul Pierce, Tracy McGrady, and Vince Carter also qualify at SF, that’s where they go. So what you end up with is only guys who qualify purely at SG for this tier ranking. What you also end up with is a HUGE tier drop between tiers two and three, as you’ll see:
Tier 1
Kobe Bryant, Ray Allen
When a guy only qualifies at SG, he’s gotta be really good to go in the first round, and both of these guys qualify. Kobe could very well be the top fantasy player in the league, and Ray Allen is one of the safest Top-20 bets in the league.
Tier 2
Jason Richardson
Boy, we really hate one-person tiers, but the gap between Richardson and the first and third tiers is just way too big for him to fit into either one of those. Richardson should be a top-30 player as long as he’s healthy, but the injury risk means he may fall a bit in your draft.
Tier 3
Raja Bell, Richard Hamilton, Cuttino Mobley, Manu Ginobili, Larry Hughes, Brandon Roy.
See what I mean by the huge tier drop between 2 and 3? J-Rich should be gone by the third … these guys shouldn’t even be considered until the fifth. Some of them are good category fillers (like Hamilton and points, Mobley and threes), but for the most part this is just good filler. We’re putting Brandon Roy here but he’s very clearly at the bottom of this tier, and he looked horrendous in his first preseason game.
Tier 4
Jamal Crawford, Bonzi Wells, Kevin Martin, JR Smith, Randy Foye
OK, really, this is where Roy belongs, but his hype-o-meter readings say he’ll be taken above all these guys. (What, you mean you don’t have a hype-o-meter at home? I keep mine in a case right next to my upside-gauge and my arrest-ability index.) These guys are all late-round sleepers. A couple of commenters have jumped on the Kevin Martin bandwagon and I don’t disagree with them, and he should probably be gone first, somewhere around the eighth round. JR Smith is the other hot sleeper here, but I’m not completely sold there. These guys are all draftable, and in some cases startable, but they really belong on your bench to start the year.
Tier 5
Fred Jones, DeShawn Stevenson, Flip Murray
These guys shouldn’t even be drafted but all could potentially have some value depending on how the first few weeks of the season shake out.
See? That’s it for SG’s. Not too much, right? Tomorrow we’ll look at a much more crowded position, SF.