Meeks and Augustin might just be incredibly underpaid...

[Phobo_Phile]

If they maintain their production from their last season of course. A reddit user named Swederman (not me, I'm nowhere near this smart) used a formula with Win Shares to determine player's salary they earned in comparison to what they actually made. Therefore, he was able to determine the most underpaid and overpaid players last season. His full post is here...[url]http://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/2bbcfs/what_if_salary_was_based_on_actual_performances/][/url]

According to his findings, Andre Drummond was the most valuable in the league compared to his contract. Based on Win Shares he was worth almost 19 million, but of course he is still locked in to his rookie deal.

The same using this same formula, Jodie Meeks was worth over 14 million to his team, meanwhile DJ Augustin was almost worth 10. In fact, if you remove rookie deals, than Jodie Meeks becomes the most underpaid player last year and Augustin is fourth.

Of course, this also means that Josh Smith was criminally overpaid for his contribution to the team. He was the sixth most overpaid, but first for players that actually played a full season for their team whether it be due to injury or being waived/traded.

EDIT:Sorry for the poor formatting. I don't really know how to make it better/easier to read. I just thought that this would be interesting for our board to discuss.

[Snakebites]

The same metric also says Kyle Singler was worth over 8 million last year, so I don't accept it.

[cochiseuofm]

Keep in mind that what this user has done is taken the total number of WS per team and divided each player's contributions to that total. The Pistons had 32 total WS last year so Drummond's WS of 9.9 is a hair above 30% of that as shown above. Based on that, the user is then saying Drummond is worth 30% of the Pistons total salary cap.

But this assumes that the Pistons being a team that wins 28-32 games is ideal which it isn't so it is a flawed calculation if you are looking at it as an indicator for the future.

All this is showing is how much each player should have been paid for what they did on the court last year if everything was weighted based on that. And to be honest it doesn't even do a good job of that because it restricts what a player can make by only offering them a % of the wins their team earned. Somehow LeBron having a WS of 16 is worth marginally less to the Heat than Drummond's 9.9 because the Heat won more games? Makes zero sense.

[Snakebites]

Keep in mind that what this user has done is taken the total number of WS per team and divided each player's contributions to that total. The Pistons had 32 total WS last year so Drummond's WS of 9.9 is a hair above 30% of that as shown above. Based on that, the user is then saying Drummond is worth 30% of the Pistons total salary cap.

But this assumes that the Pistons being a team that wins 28-32 games is ideal which it isn't so it is a flawed calculation if you are looking at it as an indicator for the future.

All this is showing is how much each player should have been paid for what they did on the court last year if everything was weighted based on that. And to be honest it doesn't even do a good job of that because it restricts what a player can make by only offering them a % of the wins their team earned. Somehow LeBron having a WS of 16 is worth marginally less to the Heat than Drummond's 9.9 because the Heat won more games? Makes zero sense.

Well, you looked at it a little more deeply than I did, but yes, this is correct.

The reason the numbers look off is because the calculations are flawed.

When you have calculations that go against what would be intuitively thought about a player, either you've discovered something nobody else has seen before or there's something wrong with your calculations. The former is possible but the latter needs to be ruled out first.

[cochiseuofm]

Yea and the thing is even a correct approach isn't very useful. You could say, there are 1,230 possible wins in a NBA season (all 30 teams could go 41-41 hypothetically so the calculation is 41 x 30.) Last year, NBA teams spent a total of $2,040,036,123 on player salaries (including teams that spent above the salary cap and into the luxury tax like the Nets.)

Simple calculation, one win is worth $1,658,565. Except that doesn't factor in playoff games which are actually worth a lot more to teams than regular season games (and because players don't get appropriated extra salary during the playoffs, it is something that has to be assessed in the overall contract IMO.) LeBron had 15.9 regular season WS last season but he is worth a lot more than the $26M the simple formula would calculate because he took his team into the Finals with 4.3 WS in the playoffs.

Meanwhile Meeks had 4.5 WS as a starter for a 27-win Lakers team that missed the playoffs.

There probably is a way to weight this right and crunch out correct salaries but I think the eye test actually works just fine.

[E-Z]

I love it. All of it. However, teams are doing it WRONG if a team has a bunch of guys being paid their full market value or above that. Meeks, relative to last season is underpaid. However, his contributions to Detroit could possibly be on the same level as last season. He's a steal if so. If not, it's nothing to really lose sleep about.

The same cannot be said about Josh Smith, and probably Greg Monroe either. That subject's a dead horse, but that corpse is not leaving until the trade deadline, at most. Anyways, I can't wait for that excel spreadsheet tomorrow.

[ImHeisenberg]

Josh Smith worth $2 million. Drummond worth $18 million.

The math adds up for me!

[Warspite]

Instead of basing it off of each teams WS it should be based off the best teams WS.

[Phenomenonsense]

Instead of basing it off of each teams WS it should be based off the best teams WS.

Yeah, if we correct for the ratios of "better teams WS" in some way, it might make for interesting data.