NBA Pay Scale 2006- Intro

The NBA Pay Scale: A New Method of Ranking NBA Players

For as much as I enjoy the National Basketball Association, it does pose a number of vexing problems to its fans. The league’s instance on marketing itself to white Baby Boomers when it clearly has stronger appeal with young people and African Americans stands out as a particularly questionable move. I personally would like to know how any commissioner as autocratic as David Stern allows so many billionaire owners to make such a hash of their franchises. Yet above all this stands a quandary whose simplicity belies its elusiveness. How do we measure the relative value of basketball players?

It doesn’t immediately seem that comparing the value of players would be more difficult than in other sports. Yet basketball players are many times harder to rank because the game lacks a clear hierarchy. In hockey everyone acknowledges the relative superiority of a quality goaltender over a quality defenseman. In baseball no general manager would equate a position player’s value with a pitcher’s value. Football has more hierarchies than any other sport, describing the various power schemes and structures on an average team would require enough multi-colored flow charts and computer models to fill an Office Depot. The hardship of ranking NBA players comes with the fact that they all perform the same basic tasks on the court, dribbling, passing, shooting, rebounding, etc.

How then do we distinguish one player’s performance from another’s? For years people relied on the “holy trinity” of basketball stats, scoring, assists, and rebounding. Recently new statistical measures have arisen, some of which I have pointed to on this site. Others have attempted to use more subjective measures. At the beginning of the last NBA season I wrote a column greatly aping Bill Simmons annual rankings of all players based on their trade value. At that time I thought the trade value system was a useful means to rank players, since it began with the only opinion in basketball that truly mattered, that of the association’s owners and general managers. However on further review the very idea of assessing a player’s worth based on how willing the team would be to trade him seems like a backhanded compliment. Really that column pointed out that save for one guy every player in the league is someone else’s second choice. That is a very misleading way to measure the players. No team looks at its starting lineup and says “Well, we have half a Kevin Garnett, three-fourths a Sam Cassell, 0.8234 of a Brad Miller, two percent of a Kobe, and one whole Carmelo Anthony.” In fact if you want to take the front office perspective, you should remember that front offices already have a pretty basic means of assessing a player’s value; it’s called their salary.

Naturally player salaries aren’t a perfect metric either, however they do represent a simple, practical, and real world method of assigning value to a player. Any well informed basketball fan can easily point to several players whose pay is disproportionate to their play one way or the other. It’s true that due to collective bargaining agreements, marketing value, flukes of fate, or plain old bad decisions most players’ salaries are loosely tied to their on the court value. However the fine people at 82games.com, have created a method of estimating what a player’s salary would be if he were paid proportionate to his direct impact on the team’s success. You can see their work here. I was inspired by this concept, to abandon trade values as my default player rating and instead attempt to forge a new ranking system. This system applies the statistical evidence collected by 82games.com and expresses it through a clear, absolute figure that of hypothetical “fair salary” dollars. Then it combines the objective evidence with the subjective, relative assessments that drove my early writings about trade values and drive the thinking of most executives when they write the checks for the player’s actual salaries. Now I can express a player’s value through a single metric that shows a combination of the value he earned on the court and his perceived value in the eyes of the front office.

The rules for measuring players on this new Pay Scale are simple. Imagine the association passed a new rule tonight that said in the next 48 hours teams can make one bid on all their players to lock them up for the next season. No previous contracts matter. No issues of seniority or time with a team matter. No salary cap ramifications are involved. If a player turns down his team’s offer, he becomes an unrestricted free agent with the likely outcome being their current team will lose them. Now estimate how much money any given team would be willing to pay for any of their players for one season of work. I’d imagine every team would do their best to estimate the absolute highest salary a player could demand and not pay them one cent more. (I’m just going to assume that all teams want to keep their current rosters in tact, but that doesn’t mean everyone will get a good offer.) From their on out you just run down every player of interest and measure them by what they earned on the court, and what the front office perceives his value to be based on two factors: how much money can they make from that player and how does he improve their chances to win more games and more championships. I have the players ranked from bottom to top based on how much the teams would offer them.

By taking this experiment and spending way more time on it than I have to spare I have reached the following conclusions. So please read along as I rank all players in the NBA according to where I think they fall on the Pay Scale, starting with the Lowlights.