How much would Stephen Curry be worth if the NBA had no maximum salary?
For the past four years, Curry has indisputably been the league's best value. Playing on a contract extension signed with the Golden State Warriors when he was returning from ankle surgery and hadn't yet emerged as a star -- as well as prior to the salary cap jumping by more than 60 percent -- Curry won two MVPs (one unanimously) and helped the Warriors win two championships during a stretch where he made less money ($44 million) than David Lee ($46 million).
Now, eligible to become the first player to re-sign with his team using the new designated veteran exception, Curry is about to get paid. A super-max five-year contract for Curry would be worth more than $40 million per season. Even that won't completely capture Curry's immense value.
What would his production be worth in a league without a limit on player salaries?
Projecting Curry's production
Ordinarily, I project future performance for NBA players using the development of the 50 most similar players at the same age as determined by my SCHOENE projection system. That doesn't really work with Curry, for whom no players meet the similarity score threshold (90) I typically use as a cutoff. (The closest comp for Curry at age 29? Mark Price's 1992-93 season for the Cleveland Cavaliers.)
So, instead, we'll apply the typical aging curve for a 29-year-old to Curry's baseline projection, which is based on his performance over the past three seasons (with the most recent season weighted heaviest). That yields the following projections for wins above replacement player (WARP) and player win percentage, the per-minute version of the stat akin to PER.
I also use ESPN's real plus-minus (RPM) to help measure player performance that isn't captured in the box score. Curry finished last season with a multiyear RPM of plus-7.67. Applying the typical RPM aging curve projects him for a plus-7.52 RPM next season, which ranks sixth in the league and would translate to a player winning percentage of .718. (RPM tends to be more conservative in assessing player value, so no player has an RPM projection as high as Curry's projected player winning percentage.)
The last step is adding those together, with WARP double-weighted because of its higher year-to-year stability. That produces a projected .765 player win percentage and 19.2 WARP for Curry, putting him just ahead of LeBron James and reigning MVP Russell Westbrook for the best 2017-18 projection.
Projecting the cost of a win
Now that we have a projection for the wins Curry will provide next season, we need to convert that to a dollar figure by determining the cost of a win in free agency. Including Curry, this year's free agents are projected to produce 294 WARP as a group. So what we need to determine is how much money will be spent in free agency.
What we know is where the salary cap is expected to be set: $99 million, according to the latest projection the NBA sent to teams after the playoffs. Here's how much teams have spent on average relative to the cap over the life of the previous NBA collective bargaining agreement:
With the exception of last season, when teams were unable to spend much more than the cap collectively despite throwing around wild contracts in free agency -- blame the old-cap contracts like Curry's still on the books -- the ratio of the cap has generally fluctuated between about 110 percent and 115 percent. So I'll take a conservative estimate of total spending at 110 percent (which would mean about $3.27 billion total salary leaguewide) and an aggressive one at 115 percent ($3.415 billion).
From those estimates, we have to subtract a little less than $2.5 billion in committed salary between guaranteed contracts, salary for unsigned draft picks and dead salary paid to players who already have been waived. We'll also take off another $75 million or so in likely salary to players whose contracts are non-guaranteed or have options that haven't yet been picked up.
That leaves our estimate for what teams will spend in free agency between about $790 million in 2017-18 salary on the low end and $940 million on the high end. Either way, because of the raises for players like Curry, free agents will make more than they did last season (a total of around $760 million).
Doing the math, in the conservative scenario each WARP would cost $2.7 million in free agency. The aggressive estimate has them costing $3.2 million.
Returning to Curry, we now have a range for what his production is worth. Adding in the $1.5 million veterans minimum -- the value of a player with zero WARP -- Curry's 19.2 WARP translates into somewhere between $53 million and $63 million in 2017-18. That's at least $19 million, and up to $29 million, more than even the super-max will pay Curry.
In a version of the NBA with no player maximum salary but the same salary cap, it's tough to say whether Curry and other superstars would be able to capture their full value. Paying him $63 million would leave a team just $36 million to fill out the rest of its roster -- which still might be worth it, given the possibility of adding to the core using exceptions in future years.
Whatever Curry's exact value, it's clear that he remains a bargain even at a much higher salary.