With the NBA locked out because the owners aren’t making any (or enough) money? Who are the worst contracts in the NBA? Who are the guys we can blame for this mess?
Well, we should blame the general managers and owners who gave out these contracts.
But who have the worst contracts in the NBA? Over at the Wages of Wins blog — based on the NBA stats of Dave Berri, author of Wages of Wins — they took a crack at it. They figured the cost of an NBA win ($1.58 million, which is total salary paid by the league divided by wins) then used their “wins produced” stat to figure out how much people contributed. (I have issues with wins produced, but it still makes for an interesting discussion.)
Here are the top three:
1. Michael Redd (Milwaukee). He made $18.3 million and played just 134 minutes due to injury. This is a case of a max contract going bad that the owners can point to as why they want shorter deals and buyouts. The Bucks offered him a six-year max deal starting at $12 million a season in 2005, when he was regarded as maybe the best pure shooter in the game. That next season he averaged 23.3 points per game and shot 39.5 percent from three, and while we can debate if he really deserved max money the guy was a very good player and just 26 years old. Knee injuries undid him and he has never been quite the same, playing just 61 games total the last three years of that deal.
2. Andrea Bargnani (Toronto). I have a problem with this one. No doubt Bargnani is overpaid at $8.5 million last season and he gives the Raptors poor defense and poor rebounding, plus he doesn’t get to the line enough. But the guy scored 21.4 points per game and had an above average PER. I’m not a fan of defending him because he is overpaid, but not one of the most overpaid in the league.
3. Yao Ming (Houston). He made $17.7 million last season but played just five games due to injury. Which was five more than he played last season. Another case where the owners would like to argue for shorter contracts of having buyouts so that seriously injured players don’t to keep pulling in massive contracts.
The rest of the top 10 are Gilbert Arenas (he should be higher up than Bargnani), Antawn Jamison, Brandon Roy, Kenyon Martin, Richard Hamilton, Nick Collison and Ben Gordon
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AP
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Report: Dwight Howard not going to Clippers… did we need a report for that?
May 20, 2013, 1:25 PM EDT
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May 20, 2013, 12:28 PM EDT
Reuters
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