RealGM

babyjax13 wrote:Below average starter at either forward position making ~$20 million/year for 3 seasons when he should be making around $10 million.

EDIT: I've been pretty consistent on the Harrison Barnes is a terrible contract bandwagon, but I'll elaborate.

BPM --- RAPTOR --- RPM
2012-13 --- [-1.7] --- [N/A] --- [-1.13]
2013-14 --- [-1.6] --- [-3.8] --- [-4.16]
2014-15 --- [0.1] --- [-0.5] --- [0.07]
2015-16 --- [-1.3] --- [-1.7] --- [-0.65]
2016-17 --- [-0.8] --- [-0.2] --- [-0.97]
2017-18 --- [-0.5] --- [-1.5] --- [-1.54]
2018-19 --- [-1.4] --- [-1.3] --- [-0.26]
2019-20 --- [-1.4] --- [-1.4] --- [-1.02]
2020-21 --- [0.2] --- [2.7] --- [-0.09]

In almost every season, on almost every team, he has been a negative value player as a starter. So yes, he has size, and he can shoot, and despite that has still managed to be a net-negative as a starter every year of his career except this season, and as of right now, we have a small sample. Maybe he keeps it up all season, if so, that's great! But it's not the Harrison Barnes we've seen for 612 games before this season.

Just take last year as an example, he was 257th (79th at SF) in RAPTOR and 170th (53rd at SF) in RAPTOR WAR last season, that puts him in a rough group with:

Troy Brown Jr.
Andrew Wiggins
Reggie Bullock
James Ennis
Doug McDermott
Cedi Osman
Trevor Ariza
Cam Johnson
Kyle Anderson
Dillon Brooks

And a good chunk of those guys made $8-$13 million a year, and some were even considered overpaid at that [but I'd say it's roughly appropriate]. So, let's say at best, using these players as approximate peers, that Barnes should be a $13 million/year player (entirely appropriate for a 6th or 7th man, or your 5th best starter - probably the role Barnes should be in, a team's 5th to 7th best player), that has him overpaid by $9 million this year, $7 million the next, and $5 million the year after.

Heck, we can even go to 538's player rater, which rates Barnes as a $4.5 million player for this season (so the rough approximation above may be too high from a standpoint that considers metrics absent anything else): https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2021-nba-player-projections/harrison-barnes/