Getty Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of the OKC Thunder
A common debate in the NBA world is “Who has the best contract?” Lists are released regularly, fans debate it on social media, and few ever agree that the list is correct.
That said, when evaluating contracts from an analytical perspective, using one of the most highly regarded advanced metrics, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (SGA) has the most valuable contract in the league by a huge margin, and here is why.
Before diving into this, it is important to establish that the analysis conducted to create this ranking relied heavily on the composite metric Estimated Plus-Minus (more on that below). Secondly, players on rookie contracts were not included, as they tend to have a much greater chance at outperforming their contracts.
Conducting the Analysis
To create this list, Taylor Snarr’s Estimated Plus-Minus (EPM) was used as the key metric. A 2021 survey from HoopsHype found EPM to be one of the best catch-all, all-in-one composite metrics available for fans and league executives.
Steve Ilardi, who previously worked as a consultant for the Phoenix Suns said in the survey that they “regard EPM as the obvious gold standard of all-in-one metrics.”
After retrieving EPM and estimated wins (EW), which are derived from EPM, from Snarr’s website, player salary and team salary data was gathered from Spotrac. The next step was to calculate how much a win is worth in the NBA. There are several ways to go about this, but the most straightforward is to calculate the total payroll of all 30 teams and then divide it by the total number of available wins in a given season.
Next, we must calculate how much each player has earned so far this year. The crude way to do this is to divide the player’s salary by 82 games to get their per-game salary, before multiplying it by the number of games their team has played so far.
Let’s use SGA as an example:
SGA’s salary for the 2023-24 season: $33,386,850
SGA’s salary per game: $33,386,850 / 82 = $407,156
SGA’s salary so far: $407,156 x 44 (games played by OKC so far) = $17,914,895
Okay, so we know SGA has been paid ~$17.9 million so far this season. Now we will use EPM to calculate how much SGA has been worth this season. Looking at the EPM data, we can see that SGA has 12 estimated wins this year (the most in the league). Multiplying those 12 wins with the “cost” of a win, we get a true value of ~$49,206,908.
The final step is to subtract SGA’s earnings so far from his true value:
$49,206,908 – $17,914,895 = $31,292,013
So, in other words, SGA has outperformed his contract so far this season by ~$31 million.
Checking Out the Results
After repeating the above steps for every player in the league (or doing it all at once depending on how computer-savvy you are), we can sort the list to see which players have outperformed or underperformed their contract the most.
@AOP_NBABest and Worst NBA Contracts
SGA (~$31M), Derrick White (~$17M), and Nikola Jokic (~$16.8M) have outperformed their contracts by the most this season. On the opposite end, injuries can have a profound impact. Ben Simmons has played 191 minutes across 6 games for the Brooklyn Nets this season while Ja Morant has played 318 minutes in 9 games.
According to the analysis, Simmons has underperformed his contract by ~$20.3 million (the two worst marks in the league).
While injuries are unfortunate, the reality of the matter is that they are part of the game. While everyone would love to see Morant dunking on people’s heads and Simmons back on the court dissecting defenses with his passing, their injuries diminish the value of their contracts this year.
Still, if we would like to account for huge injuries such as theirs, we can set a games-played minimum of 15 games, which gives us this list:
@AOP_NBABest and Worst NBA Contracts
Taking a step back allows us to evaluate the entire league.
@AOP_NBABest and Worst NBA Contracts
Obviously, front offices don’t simply rely on one metric to determine a player’s value, but this is a fun exercise to generate analytical conversation and get some healthy debate flowing.