Which free-agent deals made the least sense this July? We have six that stood out as the most questionable.
Over the past few weeks we witnessed a feeding frenzy of free-agent spending. Even bench guys like Solomon Hill and Timofey Mozgov inked shiny new deals worth over $50 million each.
What's going on?
The salary cap catapulted 34 percent overnight, and NBA teams were flush with $720 million in combined new cap space to fill out their rosters. The unprecedented infusion of cash has GMs tossing out new deals like they're denominated in Monopoly money.
How Much Is A Player Really Worth?
Contracts have been so staggering this offseason, many have taken to trying to translate the amounts to better process the free-agent deals in this new salary cap world. For example, one trick floating through the internet has been to cut every salary in half, a $20 million salary means it was a $10 million price tag last season.
This is pure hyperbole, of course, but it kind of feels true.
What's the real situation?
As shown, a $10 million deal last season would translate to $13.4 million in salary-inflated 2016-17 dollars. It would also equal $14.6 million in 2017-18, when the cap is projected to leap again (up to about $102 million).
And a little arithmetic shows that Mozgov's new 4-year, $64 million contract -- averaging $16 million per year -- corresponds to just $43.2 million ($10.8 million per year) in last year's dollars.
Is Mozgov worth $10.8 million a year in 2015-16 dollars? Hardly. In fact, our analysis of 60+ new free agent contracts this summer suggests that about 80 percent are bad deals for the team.
How can we tell?
For each contract, we compared the player's total salary with his total estimated Real Value based on predicted real plus-minus (RPM) impact, projected playing time, predicted RPM Wins each season (a function of RPM and minutes played) and the estimated dollar value of each win (about $2.58 million per win next season).
Then, we made a simple calculation:
Surplus Value = Real Value - Actual Salary
A positive Surplus Value suggests that the contract is a bargain for the player's team, while a negative value indicates that the team overpaid.
DeMar DeRozan (Surplus Value: -$78.1M)
DeMar DeRozan just put up 23.5 points per game for a Toronto team that put up a respectable fight with the Cleveland Cavaliers for the Eastern Conference title.
Sounds like a guy who's worth a new max contract, right?
Not so much.
DeRozan emerged as the summer's most highly overpaid free agent in our analysis -- worth about only $65 million of his new $139 million deal.
The Raptors wing may be a volume scorer, but that's really his only elite attribute. On the season, DeRozan converted only 44 percent of his field goal attempts and a mere 33 percent of his 3-point attempts. He managed to eke above the league average in true shooting percentage (.550) only due to his superior ability to get to the line (8.4 free throw attempts per game).
With his modest scoring efficiency and low turnover rate, DeRozan is clearly an above-average offensive player -- indicated by his offensive RPM value of 2.33 last season. It's not an elite number, but it's pretty good.
His impact on the defensive end, however, is more problematic.
For starters, the Raptors defended much better with DeRozan off the court, to the tune of 5.6 points per 100 possessions. This matches his woeful -2.47 defensive RPM impact, and it's consistent with his lackluster defensive boxscore numbers (steals, defensive rebounds, and blocks) for a wing player.
Even on offense, Toronto really didn't miss a beat when DeRozan sat. During the regular season and playoffs, the Raptors played about five points better per 100 possessions without DeRozan. That contrasts starkly, for example, with Kyle Lowry's plus-24 on-off impact in the playoffs.
To us, it's obvious that DeRozan was not the main driver of the Raptors' success last season. Remember, Toronto played considerably better when he was on the bench.
And yet DeRozan just signed the second-most lucrative contract in NBA history.
Since he's not even a clearly above-average NBA player, we're still shaking our heads.
Evan Turner (Surplus Value: -$72.3M)
Last summer, the Portland Trail Blazers feasted on under-the-radar free agent bargains -- signing starter Al-Farouq Aminu and key rotation big Ed Davis to ridiculously affordable deals.
Such savvy maneuvers -- along with the slick trade acquisitions of Mason Plumlee and Mo Harkless -- allowed the Blazers to survive the loss of four-fifths of their 2014-15 starting lineup without missing a beat last season.
Unfortunately, Portland hasn't managed to repeat the stellar front office performance so far this summer. Exhibit A: signing Boston Celtics' wing Evan Turner to a bloated four-year, $70 million deal.
While Turner undoubtedly refined his game last season under Boston coach Brad Stevens, he still rates poorly under both advanced metrics and more traditional measures.
Given Turner's above average size (6-foot-7) for the shooting guard position and his low usage rate (19.1), you might guess he'd be an effective "3-and-D" guy. But you'd be wrong. Turner can't space the floor (connecting on a horrific 24 percent of his 3-point attempts last season), and his defensive impact is average at best.
No, Turner's game is more about distributing the ball -- with the third-highest rate of assists among all shooting guards last season -- and launching inefficient midrange jumpers. The problem is that Turner's limited quickness and high handle limit his ability to run an offense as a primary ball handler, and his anemic career 49 true shooting percentage renders him a relative non-factor without the ball in his hands.
As a result, Turner clocked in last year with a -1.6 RPM that barely placed above "replacement-level" in his on-court impact, and he's not expected to see improvement in play as he ages into his 30s on the new Blazers deal.
Even worse, next year he'll be playing alongside ball-dominant backcourt teammates in Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum -- when he's not taking minutes away from the hugely underrated Aminu (1.7 RPM) at the small forward position.
We see this deal as one the Blazers will soon come to regret.
Bradley Beal (Surplus Value: -$69.6M)
Bradley Beal is a solid offensive player, with a multiyear offensive RPM impact of 1.18. That's modestly above average, but it's nothing to write home about.
The young shooting guard has one outstanding NBA skill: He's a deadly 3-point shooter (40 percent career accuracy from distance). Combine that with his ability to score the ball (20 points per 36 minutes of play last year) and the fact that he's only 23 years old, and Beal looks like an obvious candidate for a max deal in the modern "pace-and-space" NBA.
Unfortunately for Beal's Washington Wizards -- who did just max him out -- Beal's overall impact falls far short of anything that might justify the lucrative new salary.
His overall offensive efficiency, for example, is only mediocre -- indicated by a .547 true shooting percentage that barely eclipsed the league average of .541 last season. Beal's superior 3-point shooting and decent ability to get into the paint were mostly offset by his vexing tendency to launch long 2s, which he converted at an atrocious 38 percent rate.
And though Beal is a decent passer for his position, his poor assist-to-turnover ratio (1.45) placed him in the bottom half of NBA wings on the metric.
Beal's defense is also sub-par (-1.70 defensive RPM), bad enough to completely offset his positive offensive impact. Not surprisingly, the Wizards played better last season with Beal off the court.
And, sadly, Beal has already spent a lot of time off the court in his young NBA career: He has missed significant time due to injuries in three of his four seasons thus far. And last season, he acknowledged that he might have to play on a minutes restriction for the rest of his career to limit the risk of recurrence on a chronic stress reaction in his leg.
While there's certainly a possible scenario in which Beal remains healthy and blossoms over the next few seasons into a much better NBA 2-guard -- one who at least comes close to deserving his massive new contract -- we believe, for reasons outlined above, the odds are not in his favor.
Kent Bazemore (Surplus Value: -$69.1M)
Kent Bazemore is a fun player to watch -- long-armed and bouncy, prone to bursts of high-energy output on a moment's notice. But our analysis suggests the Atlanta Hawks just egregiously overpaid -- to the tune of $70 million -- for the small forward's services over the next four years.
Even taking into account the shallow pool of free agent talent this summer, we're puzzled by the strong level of interest Bazemore reportedly generated around the league -- and even more so by the massive salary he was ultimately able to command.
For starters: Bazemore has turned in starkly negative RPM values every season of his four-year NBA career. Last season he finished with a subpar RPM of -1.39. Not surprisingly, the Hawks also played better -- about two points per 100 possessions -- when Bazemore was on the bench, despite the fact that he played most of his minutes with Atlanta's starters.
It gets worse. Our Predictive RPM metric -- which draws from three full seasons of each player's historic data and uses aging curves to estimate his future RPM impact -- pegs Bazemore at an atrocious -2.5 next season. That's below replacement-level.
But aren't his box score stats impressive, at least?
Actually, they're just OK.
His 11.7-point scoring average certainly doesn't dazzle. Nor does his 35.7 percent accuracy from downtown, which was right at the league average among all NBA wings last season and below average among starters. Bazemore was also a poor ball handler on the wing, with nearly as many turnovers as assists. And his relative inability to get to the line -- only two free throw attempts in 28 minutes per game -- and his pedestrian 18.7 percent usage rate further limited his offensive impact.
Sure, Bazemore is a solid rebounder for his position, hauling in an impressive six boards per game, but to put that in context: He ranked only 22nd out of 56 qualifying small forwards in total rebounding rate last season.
In sum, neither advanced metrics nor traditional box score stats paint a picture of Bazemore as a $17.5 million-per-year player. And it's really not that close.
Harrison Barnes (Surplus Value: -$62.4M)
We thought Barnes' market value might take a hit after his disappearing act in the NBA Finals. We were wrong.
With the championship on the line, Barnes shot a woeful 5-for-32 in Games 5, 6 and 7 combined, even as the Cleveland Cavaliers repeatedly left him open and simply dared him to make plays.
Barnes devotees -- such as Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban (who just handed Barnes a new max contract) -- will doubtless say it's unwise to judge any player on such a small sample size of games. Fair enough.
They might also point to Barnes' superior 3-point production last season -- 38.3 percent accuracy on 214 long-range attempts. And that apparent floor-spacing prowess certainly looks impressive, at least until we take a deeper dive into the data.
According to player tracking metrics on NBA.com, whenever Barnes launched a 3 last season without being wide open (i.e., without having the nearest defender over six feet away), he connected on only a paltry 30.6 percent of his attempts.
If we put Barnes on nearly any team other than the Golden State Warriors -- Dallas, for example -- and he'll almost certainly suffer a massive drop in shooting efficiency. Barnes' steady diet of open looks in the Warriors' record-shattering offense will be replaced by much tighter coverage in the Mavs' more run-of-the-mill offensive sets. The results might not be pretty.
Sure, the 24-year-old is still young enough to see improvement over the next couple of seasons. But we have a hard time identifying any attributes that could make the former Tar Heel a high-impact player. His 11.7 points per game certainly weren't scintillating last season. Neither were his steal (0.7 per 36 minutes), assist (2.1) or block (0.2) rates.
And while the Warriors outscored opponents by 10 points per 100 possessions with Barnes on the court, he shared the court with some of the best players in the league. When your teammates are Stephen Curry, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson, it's nearly impossible not to post an impressive raw plus-minus number.
In fact, one of the major reasons we developed the RPM metric was to estimate each player's impact after adjusting for the strength of his teammates and opponents. The resulting adjustment in Barnes' case is sobering: He had an anemic RPM rating of -1.3 last season.
And the Warriors didn't miss a beat whenever Barnes went to the bench. They were actually two points better in net efficiency without him.
The Mavericks are now paying the maximum for a player who started on one of the greatest teams of all time. But Barnes was mostly just along for the ride, not a major contributor to the Warriors' success. We have every reason to expect he'll have a similarly modest impact in Dallas.
Timofey Mozgov (Surplus Value: -$51.5M)
Yes, the Los Angeles Lakers really signed Timofey Mozgov to a stunning four-year, $64 million deal.
What were they thinking?
Well, the 7-foot-1 Russian did start 48 games for the Cavaliers, last season's eventual NBA champion. He also ranked as the 11th-best center in the NBA according to RPM impact during the 2014-15 season.
But Mozgov underwent a procedure last summer to permanently remove frayed meniscus in his right knee, and there are lingering concerns that it never has properly healed.
Sadly, Mozgov's movement is now visibly less nimble than it was pre-surgery, and the big man saw significant drops in nearly every metric last season. Particularly telling was his plummeting RPM value, which dropped from a sterling 2.86 in 2014-15 to a truly awful -4.24 last season. It's the difference between a quality starter and a marginal deep bench guy.
We certainly wish Mozgov all the best as he works next season to get back to his pre-injury form for the Lakers, but we see little reason for optimism. At age 30, Mozgov is on the wrong side of the aging curve, and we would expect further physical decline of any center by the time he reached 34 (Mozgov's age on the end of his new contract).
Perhaps his deal might still have been a defensible gamble had it been for less money, as there's a decent chance that Mozgov won't be as bad in future seasons as he was in 2015-16. But it's unlikely that he'll ever get back to his old form, and $64 million was far too high a price for the Lakers to find out.