JaVale McGee and 5 Players Who Must Live Up to Their Contract

With great money comes great responsibility. 

These five NBA players have parlayed their production and potential into huge contracts during the league's free-agency period, and they now have to live up to their new deals. 

Each of them is a young player who recently broke out—some to a larger extent than others. Their breakouts can't be done if they're going to justify getting paid so much money by their teams. 

Read on to find out which five players we're talking about. 

Nicolas Batum

The Associated Press has reported that Nicolas Batum will be remaining with the Portland Trail Blazers, as the French small forward's team has decided to match the Minnesota Timberwolves' four-year, $45 million offer sheet. 

Neil Olshey had this to say about the decision: 

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"The decision was made a long time ago. We were never not going to have Nicolas back. We did investigate certain things with Minnesota as a due diligence deal.

"We wanted to make sure we explored every option to improve our basketball team, but there was never a situation where there was a commensurate package offered back that was attractive enough to let Nicolas go."

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Despite the surety that the Portland general manager expressed, there was a whole bunch of uncertainty about where Batum would end up playing during the 2012-2013 season. 

Now, after all the fuss about the yet-to-breakout small forward, Batum has to live up to both the hype and the newfound payday. 

Batum is a great defender on the perimeter and a solid shooter, but he has to improve his game inside the three-point line on both ends of the court. 

The Frenchman has been on lists of breakout candidates for a few years now and has yet to truly experience a breakout into the realm of the elite players. Now that he's paid like an elite player, he absolutely has to become one. 

Roy Hibbert

The Indiana Pacers agreed to match the Portland Trail Blazers' four-year, $58 million offer sheet for Roy Hibbert, making the Georgetown product a max player. 

Now that Hibbert is a max player, he's going to have to start performing like one. 

It isn't enough that the center is an elite defender and shot-blocker.

Max players are expected to be able to carry their teams when the rest of their teammates are having off-days, to boost their performances when the situation calls for it and to perform admirably on both sides of the ball. 

This signing made a bit of sense because of the lack of quality centers in the NBA, but Hibbert still doesn't seem to deserve this much money to me. 

Jeremy Lin

Linsanity lives on, but it's shifting locales. 

Now that the New York Knicks have decided not to match the offer sheet extended to Jeremy Lin by the Houston Rockets, the breakout point guard is moving to Houston and hoping to live up to his three-year, $25.1 million deal.

Lin is working with a tremendously small sample size of quality starts as the point guard in New York, but he still managed to turn his production and marketability into a large contract. 

After all of the drama associated with his free-agency saga, there's even more pressure on him to succeed. 

While with the Knicks, Lin was still the new face, the exciting young floor general whom no one had expected to be great. 

Now, people expect for Lin to succeed. Otherwise, he wouldn't have been paid quite as much. 

Brook Lopez

Brook Lopez is getting paid $60 million over the next four years, making him the NBA's latest max-contract player. 

The Brooklyn Nets are taking a bit of a gamble here, as Lopez's game in the past has screamed, "I'M NOT A MAX PLAYER EVEN THOUGH I LOOK LIKE IT SOMETIMES WHEN I'M HEALTHY!" 

Lopez is an insanely good offensive player, capable of putting up 20 points per game with his work on the block and his mid-range game.

However, he's not exactly a solid defensive player and pulls out his smart phone to look up the word "rebounding" whenever his coach talks about it. 

Additionally, Lopez is developing the injury-prone label after foot injuries caused him to play just five games in the lockout-shortened season. 

To justify his average of $15 million a season over the next four years, Lopez will have to stay healthy and fix his glaring flaws. 

JaVale McGee

JaVale McGee is still more famous for his contributions to YouTube than he is for his play on the basketball court. 

A mercurial center, McGee has been branded as immature and lazy throughout his years in the NBA.

He's thrown alley-oops to himself while losing, tried for meaningless triple-doubles while facing a large deficit, goaltended unnecessarily and seemed unaware of the situation too many times to count. 

That said, the big man has a ton of potential and was starting to live up to it once he joined the Denver Nuggets. 

Now that he's getting paid $44 million over the next four years, McGee has to stop with the antics and start with the dominant basketball.