Analysis
Analysis

NBA Best And Worst Contracts Part V: Southwest Division

- by Fox Doucette

Welcome to Part 5 of our 6-part series taking a look at every contract in the NBA—except for rookies and two-way contracts, plus anyone who didn’t play in the league last season due to injury or having been overseas or something—and quantifying the ratio of minute-weighted dollars paid to Win Shares produced. To remind folks who haven’t read previous entries in this series: As a quick reminder, a rookie, veteran minimum, or midlevel exception contract should produce a Wiggins Factor below 100, a rotation player with a rotation salary should be under 200, and ideally you want your superstar-level contracts …

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Analysis

NBA Best And Worst Contracts Part IV: Northwest Division

- by Fox Doucette

In previous installments of this series, we’ve looked at the relative value of the contracts in the Eastern Conference in terms of Win Shares per minute-weighted dollar of salary. Time for a trip out west, and we’ll run into the namesake of the Wiggins Factor stat when we get to Minnesota (spoiler alert: It’s a train wreck.) If having great value on contracts is a harbinger of making a deep playoff run, you might want to get to Vegas and get some money down on the Jazz. As a quick reminder, a rookie, veteran minimum, or midlevel exception contract should …

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Analysis

NBA Best And Worst Contracts Part III: Southeast Division

- by Fox Doucette

In the previous two editions of this series, we took a look at the best and worst contracts in the Atlantic and Central Divisions, and we finish our look at the Eastern Conference today with the Dumpster fire that is the Southeast Division—a division Orlando won with a 42-40 record and sent no other teams to the playoffs. Which, in turn, points to the wisdom of the NBA making its playoff standards division agnostic. In the old days, the 4 seed Magic would’ve hosted the 5 seed Celtics in Game 1 of the first round, a Celtics team that won …

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Analysis

NBA Best And Worst Contracts Part II: Central Division

- by Fox Doucette

Yesterday, we took a look at the Wiggins Factor of teams in the Atlantic Division. We found some great value rookie contracts that set the bar for the very best young value plays in Pascal Siakam, Jarrett Allen, and Mitchell Robinson. We also found some terrible values, most of them on the Knicks, and established that somewhere around 400 or 500 is the cutoff for when a contract is just a bad use of the money even on a superstar player. We also found that the standard changes as you rise up the scale; guys on a rookie contract are …

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Analysis

NBA Best And Worst Contracts Part I: Atlantic Division

- by Fox Doucette

We have talked extensively on the subject of Wiggins Factor, a formula designed to relate NBA salary to Win Shares on a per-minute basis and determine which players provide the most bang for the buck in terms of powering good teams to titles…or, by contrast, the players who are such a waste of money that every minute they’re on the floor all they do is bring your team closer to the draft lottery. But now it’s time to pull all the data together from across the league and give all those raw numbers some context. Over the next six days, …

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Analysis

Manu Ginobili vs. Chris Paul: Who Was Better?

- by Fox Doucette

Manu Ginobili is arguably the greatest foreign player ever to wear an NBA uniform—it’s pretty much down to him or Dirk Nowitzki. Which led the Twitter summer hot take machine to toss out this beauty of an argument over the weekend. Hot Take: Manu Ginóbili is better than Chris Paul — ⚡️ (@HeadbandBookk) August 12, 2019 The whole thing got me thinking. Chris Paul is worth a few superlatives in his own right, but the biggest one might be one he shares with John Stockton and Karl Malone as the best players never to win a championship. Paul is in …

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Analysis

PER Is a Garbage Stat and We Should Stop Using It

- by Fox Doucette

Player Efficiency Rating is one of the oldest advanced NBA stats, devised by John Hollinger and popularized by ESPN back in the early days of the league’s rise out of the Dark Ages in the mid-aughts. In theory, it takes the totality of a player’s contributions on the basketball court, distills it into one number, sets the league average at 15, and is sufficiently position-agnostic to make it possible to compare guards to centers the way you compare catchers to shortstops by Wins Above Replacement in baseball. In practice, it’s been all but completely superseded by Win Shares (and its …

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Analysis

How Well do NBA Win Shares Correlate to Actual Wins?

- by Fox Doucette

In an earlier Statistical Test on this here quality NBA publication, we took a look at Value Over Replacement Player (or, as it’s known in the Pace and Space offices, One Stat to Rule Them All) and found a strong correlation between VORP and team wins that can describe a team’s win total so accurately that if you have a reasonably good way to predict a roster’s VORP in advance, you’re more than halfway to beating the over/under game in Vegas. But there’s another stat out there that claims to do the same thing, and they even went so far …

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Analysis

Golden State Warriors Headed for a Fan-Friendly Decline

- by Fox Doucette

The Golden State Warriors, mere weeks removed from their fifth straight trip to the NBA Finals, are a moribund franchise about to embark on a collapse that will give them some boffo odds in the draft lottery in 2022. Sure, they’ll hang on in the short-term, maybe even make one more deep playoff run on fumes and Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson shooting 30 threes a game between them and seeing enough of them go in to get past a not-quite-there-yet Nuggets or Jazz team in the first two rounds before the Clippers put up a Kawhilight reel in the …

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Analysis

The Wiggins Factor: A New Way to Evaluate NBA Contracts

- by Fox Doucette

Back in May, we took a look at the worst contracts in the NBA, using the human garbage fire that is Andrew Wiggins as our model for determining just how bad a contract can be. The Version 0.5 beta formula for Wiggins Factor is salary divided by (Minutes Played/3936), then multiplied by 5 if you’re applying it to estimated team stats off an individual player’s performance. So for Wiggins himself in 2018-19, that’s approximately $39.4 million. This sum is particularly egregious considering that Wiggins got paid all that money to post a career-worst .012 Win Shares per 48 minutes, a …

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