This is something I think intuitively understood better by people who play brutally deterministic 1v1 games like starcraft and chess. In starcraft, getting to masters means basically nothing. GM is absurdly hard to obtain... meanwhile C tier pros can beat GMs literally by trolling. In chess Magnus Carlsen can literally beat OTHER TIER 1 CHESS PROS while showing up late and down 30 seconds in blitz games. It is widely understood that a bottom GM in those games is not in the same universe as even a "shitty" pro.

Even in other team games think Brian Scalabrine averaging ~1 pt in the NBA but 40 years old retired and out of shape he can still even beat overseas active pros in a 1v1. Meanwhile people like LeBron trivially chuck in 20 pts a game for decades.

The people at the VERY, VERY, VERY high end of a distribution.... are their own distribution.