#SLOE: People's Basketball Sim League

Today i'll take a look at top values of contracts. I used PER as the comparable value as it's one of our only ratings that we can track performance with. What i did was took all of the players with 15 MPG or more and multiplied ever player's PER rating by a million. Then i took their salary and subtracted it versus what they actually make. I got this idea from ESPN who did this recently on their site.

So for instance we have Deron Williams:
PER = 22.5
Per x 1,000,000 = 22,500,000
PER Salary - Actual Salary - 22,500,000 - $8,129,928
Value= $14,370,072

We can see based off of PER Salary (My made up term) Deron is far outweighing his contract with production. See the *disclaimer at the bottom on why i dont love this valuation but i think it's a nice snapshot on value.


It's not surprise the top 5 player value contracts by teams go to the teams with a lot of rookie deals. The Kings Celtics, Jazz and Wizards The Pistons are probably the least surprising outlier of the group. It'd be easy to highlight AD in there who still can astonish us by having a max deal and handily outperforming it. If you look down their roster, their only non rookie deal is Bogonovic who's posting an average PER (14.8) and being paid 5 Million. It's hard to say they've done a great job on their roster outside of AD; but they've got the hardware to show, it might be all he needs anyway.
This is probably more interesting than the first list. We see a list of teams that are all over the place. The Rockets, Blazers and Magic are all contending. This tells us their guys are probably getting payed about what they're producing and they're probably not getting any special deals. The Heat and the Warriors are a different story. The Warriors have the built in excuse of being a rudderless ship. The Heat, on the other hand, took on Chris Paul (-24M Value) and Rudy Gay (- 18M Value) in trades; and signed Greg Oden (-12 M Value). I think this goes to show that maybe the Heat were looking to make a lot more noise than they're making or that the trades they made would be able to be flipped before the deadline.

We can see here our top values for these players is rookie deal players and guys signed on either min contracts who probably shouldn't have been signed there, as well as Derron Williams who was gotten at a steal on an 8 million dollar deal.

The first thing that stuck out to me is that the Heat have 3 of the top 10 worst players in terms of our valuation here, which explains them having the worst team ranking. Beyond that, i noticed that this method of valuation does not love centers. Which will lead me to the next graph. We can all see that each one of these players is that they have exited their primes or on the last year of their prime on a big deal.


What i found noticeably missing is:
1. Anthony Davis- Davis ranks #24 on the value chart. Again, this is value versus contract, not value brought to a team; so it doesn't worry my too much.
2. RFA deals- In fact we don't even have a RFA listed here until #56.
3. Jeff Duren- I'm putting this in here because he's one of the most talked about player and on a rookie deal. Kings fans, don't fret, Duren ranks number 19 on this list and has a LONG way to go to reach those final potentials.


The last thing i wanted to look up was, how are we valuing our players when it comes down to contract negotiations. We can see on this chart that there's a gulf between what PGs are being payed and what they're producing. e all saw around 5 seasons ago there was a derth of talent entering the league at the point guard spot. This created a huge run for the position in which the league overvalued the position to a large degree. We're seeing that come to play now. We're also seeing the talent that was there is getting paid at a high rate, and the skills are declining. That coupled with most of the future of the league at point guard is very raw in talent shows that maybe we shouldn't be shelling out big money to those guys unless their names are Deron Williams.

We can also see that the PF and SG positions is probably the closest in relation to value and what the position is being paid.


Overall Thoughts:
I came into this assuming a few things. We all know rookie deals are going to be the best values. I think that we can see that the future is loaded with talent despite some 'sky is falling' comments in the league. What i think we also knew was the RFA isn't really netting anyone a special deal outside of a few circumstances, which was it's intent. No one is getting alpha players on beta deals. The last piece is that some great vet deals can be had out there but you need to keep you eyes peeled for that deal. Overall, i hope everyone enjoyed this and please feel to ask if you have specific questions.


*** The main stopping points on why this can't be used versus real life are a few factors. First and probably the biggest issue with our league imo is that the greatest players in our league's PERs vastly outrank the best irl PERs. For instance, Anthony Davis' PER is a 37.9 this year after the TC gawds had their way with him and posted an outlandish 48 PER last season. In contrast, Wilt Chamberlin's greatest PER is 31.82. This just means Davis' value is going to be much higher than we could compare to in real life if you ran this same exercise. I digress off of the great AD and will get into it.

The other stopping point is PER average is 15. I could have probably wasted a day coming up with a way to take the average salary (about 7 Million) and come up with some sort of more accurate valuation of this, and i may in the future. ***

5 Points (self back pat)

Wow, excellent article. Another early candidate for Media Entry Of The Year!

Dig the premise. I tried to get something like this done a while back, but it was all vet min steals like first vet min year Nate Rob. Seeing a lot of rookie contract players here which makes sense. For future iterations, I'd be interested to see weighting for things like years of service, length of contract, dollars per minute played, etc.