Draymond Green's next contract was an important subplot of last week's decision by the Golden State Warriors to suspend Green for a game after his angry confrontation with teammate Kevin Durant on the bench and then after a loss to the LA Clippers.
While Durant's impending free agency was an obvious factor, Green too is heading toward the end of the five-year, $82 million deal he signed in the summer of 2015. An ESPN report by Chris Haynes in June indicated that after Green took less than the maximum possible then, he doesn't plan to offer a discount this time around. At the same time, the Warriors might be reluctant to offer a much larger max contract to the undersized Green, who will be 30 by the time he hits the market again.
How can we expect Green to age? Will he be worth the max on his next deal? Let's take a look.
Few comps for Green
Part of the challenge of projecting Green is that we can't really rely on the aging of similar players, because there have been so few players similar to him. My SCHOENE projection system, which considers seasons since 1989-90, rates only one player with a similarity score of better than 92 (out of 100) to Green at the same age since then: teammate Andre Iguodala, with a 93.3 similarity.
Even players who score as similar to Green don't really have the same combination of size and skills as a 6-foot-7 power forward and part-time center. FiveThirtyEight's CARMELO system rates three players as more similar to Green than Iguodala: Alvan Adams and Andrei Kirilenko, both 6-foot-9, along with 6-foot-5 point forward Paul Pressey -- who, like Iguodala, played on the perimeter.
Instead, let's start by considering the conventional wisdom that players like Green who are shorter than typical for their position tend to age worse than their taller counterparts. My analysis of more than 200 retired players whose careers concluded since 2005 and played at least nine NBA seasons suggests this is accurate.
I sorted this group by height relative to the average from their position and considered players at least 1.5 inches taller than average as the "tall" group and those at least 1.5 inches shorter as the "short" group. (The average power forward in this group was listed at 6-foot-9.5, making Green 2.5 inches shorter.)
Through age 29, the relatively short players were performing at a similar percentage of their peak player win percentage (the per-minute version of my wins above replacement player metric, akin to PER) as everyone else. From age 30 through 32, however, players who are short for their position experienced more rapid decline. By the end of that period, they were performing at 79 percent of their peak performance on average, as compared to 82 percent for players of average height for their position and 83 percent for taller than average players.
During their age-34 seasons, which would correspond to the last season of a new five-year contract for Green, just three players in the undersized group were still performing at better than 80 percent of peak value: Boris Diaw, Antonio Davis and Reggie Evans.
Valuing Green's production
With that trajectory for his career in mind, how much might Green be worth?
When I was looking at the NBA's new supermax contracts last year, I found that teams typically pay players about 3.5 percent of the salary cap for each win above replacement player (WARP) they provide. Based on that, Green's current level of performance and the typical aging curve for undersized players, here's how his value projects:
With eight years of experience, Green will be eligible to get up to 30 percent of the caps as a free agent in 2020, and his projected value is right in line with that figure before dropping as he ages. A three- or four-year max deal for Green might be sensible, particularly if teams project the cap will grow faster than his contract (making it worth a smaller percentage of the cap over time). But a full five-year max deal looks too risky to justify if Green suffers the typical decline of shorter players from his current level of performance.
How Green can defy aging curve
His size alone shouldn't doom Green to rapid decline in his 30s. The best way for Green to counteract the effects of age would be developing a more reliable 3-point shot. Better shooters typically maintain more of their value as they age than weaker ones.
During 2015-16, the best season of his career, Green made nearly 39 percent of his 3s and seemed to have turned the corner as a shooter. But since then, Green is at an even 30 percent from beyond the arc -- worse even than he had shot prior to 2015-16 (32 percent). Green has made some progress as a free throw shooter, making 77.5 percent of his attempts last season after previously shooting less than 70 percent in his career. But that effort has yet to translate beyond the arc.
If he could add shooting, Green would look good in most indicators of aging well besides height. His ability to diagnose plays won't fade with time, allowing Green to play a step faster than he really is, and his versatile skill set is also a positive in terms of aging. Green could potentially slide down and play more center later in his career, much like Diaw and PJ Tucker of the Houston Rockets, who started against Golden State in last year's conference finals at age 33.
As the examples of Diaw and Tucker suggest, Green should have no problem remaining a contributor to a championship contender in his mid-30s. Of course, he's not hoping to get paid like a contributor. (Tucker is on a four-year, $32 million contract, while Diaw got a four-year, $28 million contract with the final season non-guaranteed from the San Antonio Spurs at age 32.) Green wants to be paid like the All-Star he has been. To secure that kind of deal, Green might need to step up his game.