NBA Free Agents 2013: Analyzing Players Most Likely to Get Overpaid This Summer
Speaking as someone who gets paid to babble on the internet, NBA general managers tend to make the snide joke-writing easy over the summer months.
Most of the focus in the coming months will rightfully rest on Chris Paul and Dwight Howard, the two biggest names on the 2013 free-agent pool. They’re two players with 13 All-Star game appearances between them, cornerstone franchise guys whose maximum contracts will be warranted.
The fun—at least for the schadenfreudian folks among us—begins once those dominoes come off the board. Once Paul and Howard choose their destinations, there will be no shortage of scorned teams with a yacht-load of cap room. History tells us these general managers won’t take their money, punt the 2013-14 season and call it a day. There is a such thing as a job security factor, you know.
Instead, these general managers will fall over themselves to waste that money on players a step or two down from the Howard-Paul level. Only, desperate to field a competitive team, they won’t settle for merely paying a player slightly over his worth. They compound the problem by overspending and putting crippling albatross contracts on the books that limit everything they can do as a franchise.
That’s how we got the $40 million Gerald Wallace contract that will keep the joke fuels burning for the next three seasons. Desperation leads to terrible contracts during an NBA offseason, which is why it’s only fair to warn fans about players bound to get overpaid come this July.
With that in mind, here is a look at the players most likely to get undeserving Brinks trucks placed on their lawn in 2013.
Al Jefferson (C, Utah Jazz)
As the analytics movement (whatever that means) continues to grow across the league, players who are complete minuses on one end of the floor are becoming increasingly devalued. The emphasis on the two-way player seems like it should have happened a long, long time ago. But over the next couple of years, you're going to be seeing smart teams avoid paying exorbitant salaries to players who are unwilling or unable to play defense.
Fortunately for Jefferson, we're not quite to the point where a player of his ilk will get properly paid.
In the video game rationale—the one where defense is merely that thing you humor until going back on offense—Jefferson is one of this summer's most attractive free agents. He's so consistent offensively you can almost set his stats before the season begins. Jefferson has missed six or fewer games in each of the past four seasons, averaging somewhere between 17.1 and 19.2 points per game while grabbing right around nine rebounds.
And Jefferson's most impressive trait is his offensive versatility. Known colloquially as an interior banger to most casual fans—a 6'10", 289-pound frame will pigeonhole a player like that—Jefferson actually spends much of his time in the midrange. No center took more shots this past season than Jefferson from 16-23 feet, and he knocked down a very acceptable 41 percent rate on those looks.
Juxtapose that with his elite 73.7 percent rate at the rim and what you have is one of the league's most versatile scorers at the center position. If Jefferson was even a mediocre defender, signing him to a maximum deal wouldn't be a problem—it might even be advisable. His game isn't predicated on athleticism, and at age 28 he almost certainly has four more good-to-great seasons in his tank.
The problem is that Jefferson is one of the five worst defending big men in the league. According to Synergy Sports, which tracks every possession for the NBA, Jefferson allowed opposing players to score 0.9 points per possession and shoot 46 percent on plays where he was the primary defender.
The former statistic ranks 279th in the NBA. There were 344 players who played enough minutes to be eligible. Jefferson averaged over 33 minutes a game for Utah this past season, being memorably dreadful defensively every step of the way.
You shouldn't be surprised when I tell you there was a cosmic shift whenever Jefferson was on the floor defensively compared to when he was off. According to NBA.com, opposing teams scored 107.3 points per 100 possessions whenever Jefferson was on the floor during the regular season, equivalent to the league's third-worst defense.
With Jefferson on the bench, just 97.2 points per 100 possessions—equal to the Memphis Grizzlies' league-best mark. There are other mitigating factors here; it's not all Jefferson's fault that Utah was lousy with him on the floor. Part of that is due to the continued strangeness of Ty Corbin's defensive schemes on pick-and-rolls.
But the Jazz have given up at least nine fewer points per 100 possessions with Jefferson on the bench in two of the three seasons he's been in Utah.
Does that sound like a player you want to pay any more than $10 million per season? Didn't think so.
Brandon Jennings (PG, Milwaukee Bucks)
If you're looking for an adjective to describe the first four years of Brandon Jennings' career, I present you with "enigma." At times looking like the best young point guard in basketball and others a cancerous tumor rotting away the core of the Bucks, Jennings is one of this summer's most intriguing free agents.
Still just 23 years old and filled with untapped potential, it's unclear where Jennings' future lies. He's a restricted free agent this summer, meaning Milwaukee can match any deal the young point guard signs this offseason.
The problem is that negotiations have gone so sour between the two sides that Jennings has made some pretty public threats to the Bucks. Speaking with Marc J. Spears of Yahoo! Sports in March, Jennings said he would consider signing his restricted free-agent tender and then bolting in the summer of 2014 when he can become unrestricted.
"If I take the qualifying offer and become an [unrestricted] free agent there is no way I am coming back," Jennings said. "There is no way."
While any public statements are an obvious negotiations ploy, we've gotten a good sense of how he views himself. Spears reported that Jennings turned down a four-year, $40 million offer during the season, and there have been rumblings he's looking for a maximum deal this summer.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say no team will be shortsighted enough to make Jennings a max guy. But even if Milwaukee or any other squad goes beyond that four-year, $40 million offer that was originally on the table, there might be some well-deserved cringing among that fanbase.
In four seasons in the NBA, Jennings has made one measurable improvement in his game—three-point shooting. He was an above-average three-point shooter as a rookie at 37.4 percent and eclipsed that figure by .001 percent this past season. The two seasons sandwiched in the middle were all volume less performance, but let's give him the benefit of being an above-average three-point shooter for these purposes.
Because if we don't give Jennings that credit, it's hard to see where his play justifies even the $10 million a year he rejected. He's a career 39.4 percent shooter, putting him on this illustrious list over the past four seasons. His assist rate is below average for a point guard, and he gives up 0.9 points per possession to opposing players on defense—a number equal to the aforementioned Jefferson. Milwaukee, unsurprisingly, allowed about 10 fewer points per 100 possessions with Jennings on the bench this season.
There's no denying that Jennings is a scintillating talent, a marketable personality and a player who looks like he's on the precipice of putting it all together a decent amount. But his contract will get compared somewhat fairly to those given to Stephen Curry and Ty Lawson last fall.
Jennings is nowhere near on either players' level. If a team on the open market pays him like he is hoping, they'll be in for a rude awakening over the next few years.
Andrew Bynum (C, Philadelphia 76ers)
Jefferson and Jennings are two players who will almost certainly be overpaid, but all signs point to them both actually being on the court for the next four years. Jefferson has been quite healthy since an ACL tear in 2009, while Jennings has missed more than two games in just one season his entire career.
Andrew Bynum's resume reads quite the opposite. When he's on the floor, there's no doubting that Bynum is one of the two or three most dominant centers in the game on both ends. Even though his commitment can be a bit lax defensively, teams have to deal with him at both ends of the floor. In his last season with the Lakers, Bynum averaged 18.7 points, 11.8 rebounds and 1.9 blocks per night while challenging Dwight Howard for the best all-around center in the game moniker.
Los Angeles was over four points better per 100 possessions with Bynum on the floor defensively, though his offensive on-off impact was negligible. When the Sixers acquired Bynum for a package that included former face-of-the-franchise player Andre Iguodala, it looked like they were landing a player on the rise.
With no Kobe Bryant holding him back or pressures of being the man who replaced Shaq—always an underrated factor with Bynum, by the way—the theory went that he would thrive.
And it's possible that Bynum would have. Philly never got the chance to find out because Bynum's balky knees reared their ugly head once again. In a season full of starts and stops in rehabilitation, Bynum never set foot on an NBA floor wearing a Philadelphia 76ers uniform. With new Sixers general manager Sam Hinkie calling the Bynum deal a "failure," it's very possible that he never will.
An unrestricted free agent this offseason, many still expect Bynum to get a maximum contract—or at least something close to it. When healthy, he's the type of franchise cornerstone that so rarely hits the open market without a concrete destination, and any team that misses out on the Chris Paul-Dwight Howard sweepstakes may well throw money at Bynum and hope the knee problems are a thing of the past.
History says that Kate Upton and I have as good a chance of getting married as Andrew Bynum staying on the court. In eight NBA seasons, Bynum has missed at least 25 games in five of them. Including this season, Bynum has played in 392 of a possible 640 games in his career.
And the prognosis has only gotten worse. He was reportedly diagnosed with degeneration in both of his knees during the regular season, meaning Bynum will never play at 100 percent again. That's not good.
Obviously, everyone wishes Bynum full health and that he spends the rest of his career playing 82-game seasons. But that's not reality, and the magical NBA 2K13 doctors aren't going to be able to fix Bynum's ailing knees in real life.
Odds are, the team that chooses to pay Bynum this summer will spend an awful lot of time knowing what the Sixers felt like in 2012-13.
Follow Tyler Conway on Twitter: Follow @tylerconway22
