Nathan Sliver with sevenfortyseven.com here to try to answer the question on everyone's mind: which star fresh out of RFA with a fat new contract in hand is going to get hosed in training camp this year? Every year since 1998, when Jerry Stackhouse got decimated, the Training Camp gods have stunted the career growth of at least one RFA. After my good friends over in Portland had the future of their franchise roughed up last year, they enlisted me to try to figure out if there was a way to tell who was going to have a training camp let-down after their contract year.
So, first we need to clarify what I'm qualifying as "getting hosed." I took a broad approach and chose players that had a color drop in potential after receiving their first big contract. This, to me, represents a change in career trajectory that probably makes the team regret giving the player a big contract. In general this is guys dropping from blue/blue to green/green. There are a few exceptions in the sample but you get the idea. I looked at a few different stats to try to spot trends and settled on offensive efficiency. When I plotted the qualifying players and their year-to-year change in offensive efficiency, I noticed two very clear trends. The typical "contract year trend" and the "we should have seen this coming trend."
- Contract Year - Victims.GIF (17.28 KiB) Viewed 857 times
But then I thought, what does a successful player look like? So I plotted a few of those.
- Contract Year - Survivors.GIF (11.93 KiB) Viewed 857 times
As you can see, the contract year trend disappears but it appears that T-Mac should have fallen prey to the we should have seen this coming trend. When I took a step back and looked at the previous training camps of players following this pattern, the difference between T-Mac and, say, Stack, was that the guys that got hosed in their 5th year had mediocre to bad camps preceding the fifth year let-down.
So, now that we have a hypothesis of what we're looking for, let's try to predict what is going to happen this year in training camp. Here is a graph of the changes in offensive efficiency of this year's RFAs. I have highlighted those that I consider at risk.
- Contract Year - This Year.GIF (26.36 KiB) Viewed 857 times
Looking at the contract year guys, Corey Maggette and Manu Ginobli, we can see the clear beginning to the trend. If I had to put my money on one of the two, I'd bet Maggette gets destroyed this camp because he got the super max, whereas Manu got a relatively decent deal. I'm not sure if that matters, though, they both might get hosed. As for the we should have seen this coming bunch, Posey, Terry, and Miller, I think Jet is going to feel the wrath of the TC gods because he had a pretty crappy camp last year but I'm not ruling out the other two.
So there you have it, keep your eye on Maggette, Ginobli, Posey, Terry, and Miller this training camp, particularly on Maggette and Terry. I will mention one dark horse before I sign off, Elton Brand. Yup, I went there.
