2013-14 Player Salary per Win Share (as of March 22)

I wanted to update the list of most cost-effective contracts in the NBA through so I pulled player advanced stats and salary data from Basketball-Reference.com on March 22. As a rough measure of player efficacy I used Win Shares (WS), which attempts to estimate the number of wins a player contributes to his team in a given season (read this for Basketball-Reference's detailed explanation of the measure). I divided the player's 2013-14 salary by WS to determine, which player contributes the greatest number of wins to his team at the lowest cost to the organization. For some reference, the average cost per WS was $1,551,542 and the median cost per WS was $1,427,214.

Typically, I standardize statistics as per minute or per 48 minutes of performance to take into account for the fact that players that play more minutes also are likely to accrue more statistics than players that play fewer minutes. (Basketball-Reference.com does provide WS per 48 minutes.) But taking salary into account changes the dynamics because a player receives his salary regardless if he plays 30 minutes a game or if he plays 2 minutes a game. As a result, the organization benefits from total WS (as opposed to WS/ 48) because the player receives his full salary and not some prorated amount based on performance.

I filtered the population of 2013-14 NBA players to those that have played 100 minutes or more, which left me with 422 players. The chart below shows the full spectrum of those 422 players: Ekpe Udoh is the most expensive per WS and Isaiah Thomas is the least expensive per WS. Among the 39 qualifying players with a negative WS, Kobe Bryant comes at the greatest cost to his team (i.e., his contract in 2013-14 is very burdensome and when he plays he has a negative effect on his team's chances of winning a game--this is a bad thing.)

First, the good--the table below lists the 10 most cost-effective contracts this season in reverse order. When taking salary into account, this table suggests that Isaiah Thomas, Lance Stephenson, and Chandler Parsons are the best players this season. To give you some context of cost/ WS of other notable players, consider: LeBron ($1.45M), Durant ($1.05M), Deron Williams ($4.01M), Kevin Love ($1.13M), and John Wall ($1.04M).

 



The five least cost-effective contracts of players with a positive WS are listed below. Ekpe Udoh and Charlie Villanueva have the most cost-ineffective contracts. But they're not the worst . . .

 

While the 5 most cost-ineffective players listed above prove burdensome on the financial well-being of their organizations, they all at least contribute to WS. Among players that have played at least 100 minutes in the 2013-14 NBA season, there are 39 players with a negative WS. In other words, when they are on the floor they actually hurt their team's chances of winning. It's one thing to be Jason Terry or Aaron Gray and to be paid a lot to help a little, it's another thing to be paid a lot and to hurt one's team. The table below shows that Kobe, Derrick Rose and OJ Mayo are the greatest offenders of this latter group. Ignoring injuries to players, like Bryant and Rose, from a cost-efficacy standpoint there is evidence to suggest that through March 22, OJ Mayo is the most burdensome player in the NBA.

Blocks, Defensive Rebounding & Defensive Rebounding %

I've always assumed that defenders--centers, in particular--that focus more on blocking shots sacrifice opportunities for defensive rebounds as an attempted block puts the defender out of position to box-out opponents and secure defensive rebounds. To measure this assumption, I pulled blocks (Blk), defensive rebounds (DRB), and defensive rebounding percentage (% of DRBs a player grabs while on the floor) for centers from NBA stats (games as of February 28). I focused on centers that played at least 50 minutes and appeared in at least 5 games during the 2013-14 season (which resulted in a population of 103 centers).

I standardized blocks and DRBs both per minute played. DRB% was already standardized. Below are two charts. In the top one, I plotted Blks/ minute (vertical axis) against DRBs/minute (horizontal axis). In the bottom chart, I plotted Blks/ minute (vertical axis) against DRB%. For both I included a linear regression line (blue line) with a 95% confidence region (grey area). The line and grey area give some indication of the relationship between blocks and defensive rebounding. The anomalies in the upper right hand corner of each chart are Javale McGee in the top chart--indicating that he is exceptional as a defensive rebounder and shot blocker--and Cole Aldrich in the bottom chart--indicating that he is an exceptional shot blocker and grabs a disproportionate % of his team's DRBs. Both players present anecdotal evidence that shot blocking and defensive rebounding are unrelated.





If players with more blocks were poorer defensive rebounders then the blue line and grey area would start at the top left of the plot and slope down toward the bottom right of the plot. But that doesn't happen. In both plots the blue line is effectively horizontal, which indicates that there is no relationship between blocks and DRB or DRB%. In other words, blocks have no effect on a player's defensive rebounding.

There are some limitations to this approach to measuring the relationship between defensive rebounding and shot blocking. First, it would be better to have a measure of attempted shot blocks rather than just shot blocks. Unfortunately, the NBA does not collect this statistic (they do collect the number of shots a player has had blocked), and even if they did, it would be difficult to capture what qualifies as an "attempted shot block" as most field goal attempts are contested and, thus, could potentially be blocked. (In other words, does an attempted shot block only occur when a defender leaves his feet? Should the defender also have to have a hand raised in contesting the shot?)

Second, this approach only measures the relationship between shot blocking and two measures of defensive rebounding separately. It ignores intervening factors in the relationship, such as the DRB and shot blocking ability of teammates or a team's defensive scheme. (If there were a scheme where Kevin Love is only supposed to grab defensive rebounds and his teammates should focus on contesting shots--as often appears to be the case with the Timberwolves--then shot blocking could be indirectly related to DRB. As evidence of this Love is second to last in blocks per minute but second to best in DRB%.)