To Max or Not to Max: Is Harrison Barnes Worth Leading-Man Money?
Andrew Bogut is among the NBA's ultimate "love him if he's on your team, hate him if he's not" players, and not just because of what he does on the court. In Harrison Barnes' case, Bogut would be a great guy to have in his corner when contract negotiations begin this summer.
As Bogut recently told the San Francisco Chronicle's Rusty Simmons:
"Someone is probably going to give him the max. Let’s be honest. Someone is going to give him close to the max. There’s always a small-market team that would love someone like Harrison as their No. 1 or No. 2 option. I don’t think it’s going to having any bearing on his financial future. I think people know that everyone on this team is more valuable than their contract says - just on the basis of what they’ve given up.
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In Oakland, Barnes has blended beautifully as the Warriors' fourth banana behind Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green. But there was a time, going back to his days in high school and college, when he seemed destined for top billing.
He was a blue-chip prospect coming out of high school in 2010, became the leading scorer on a loaded squad at North Carolina in 2012 and was, in some ways, the breakout star of Golden State's 2012-13 postseason run during his rookie season.
Is he ready for that No. 1 role now? If Bogut proves prescient, one team will spend the GDP of a small island nation to find out.
To Max
On paper, Barnes has all the makings of a young player ready to leap up an echelon or two. The Ames, Iowa, native certainly looks and acts the part of a franchise face.
At 6'8" and a chiseled 225 pounds, with long arms and sky-scraping hops, Barnes has the physical tools to shine at the highest level. Skill-wise, he can do everything a modern three-and-D wing must and then some.
He's a career 37.6 percent three-point shooter who's fared better than that over his last two seasons: 40.5 percent in 2014-15; 38.3 percent during 2015-16. Along the way, Barnes has bumped up his accuracy inside the arc as well.
All told, Barnes registered in the top quartile among spot-up shooters in the league, scoring 1.08 points per possession on such attempts.
As Zach Lowe, then with Grantland, noted last September, what sets Barnes apart from the run-of-the-mill wings is what he can do defensively:
"...Barnes plausibly defending power forwards is a big part of his value. It separates him from most other spot-up wings, including his current teammates. The Warriors are deep, but Barnes is not redundant — especially as Andre Iguodala ages. If Barnes can defend power forwards, opponents face a choice: go small and risk losing a pace-and-space battle, or ask one of their two bigs to chase a wing player.
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In the season since then, Barnes held opposing power forwards to an effective field-goal percentage of 47.6 percent, per 82games.com—well below the league average of 50.2.
Barnes' ability to hang with bigger forwards allows him and the Warriors to create matchup problems on the other end. He was a crucial cog in the Warriors' so-called death lineup (Curry, Thompson, Andre Iguodala, Barnes and Green) that demolished the league this season.
But few teams, if any, will have the personnel to downsize that effectively, even with Barnes on board. If he's going to be a star (and get paid like one), it'll be by virtue of his ability to score like a No. 1 or No. 2 offensive option.
To that end, Barnes' superior size comes in handy. He showed off his low-post chops as a rookie during the 2013 playoffs and has since blossomed into one of the Association's more effective back-to-the-basket operators at his position. According to NBA.com, he scored 0.91 points per possession on post-ups, putting him in the top third of his peers overall.
Barnes is so dangerous, in the low post and otherwise, because of his blindingly quick first step. With one jab and a couple of dribbles, he can blow by some of the league's stickiest defenders and finish over shot-blockers in the paint, as he did during Round 1 against the Houston Rockets.
And if you need someone to hit a big shot in a close game, Barnes can be your guy. According to NBA.com, he sported a sparkling effective field-goal percentage of 64.7 percent on clutch shots during the regular season. In this year's playoffs, Barnes put those skills to good use with a score-tying three during Golden State's Game 4 comeback against the Portland Trail Blazers.
That ability to make plays under pressure is a huge part of what separates stars from role players, and it could be what ultimately pushes Barnes closer to the former than the latter. At the tender age of 23, this might just be the beginning of his pivot toward being a franchise player.
There are some indications, too, that Barnes may be able to shoulder a heftier on-ball load.
"Everyone asks, 'Someone is really going to pay all that for a guy who can’t run the pick-and-roll?'" Barnes told Lowe before the start of the 2015-16 season. "But I don’t worry much. I’m confident I will get better at it."
Barnes was true to his word. According to NBA.com, he scored 0.94 points per possession as the ball-handler in pick-and-roll sets—good enough to put him in the league's 88th percentile. The sample was small—just 33 plays—but could point to a player capable of doing more with the rock in his hands.
Coaches shouldn't fear putting the ball in Barnes' possession. His turnover ratio has been trending in the right direction (i.e. downward) since he turned pro in 2012.
If nothing else, he'll be able to deal with the media scrums and trips to the podium that come with rising to the occasion and championship experience. For someone as young as he is, Barnes handles the front-facing part of being an NBA player with unusual aplomb.
"Harrison’s just a class act," Kent Bazemore, a former Golden State teammate of Barnes', told Bleacher Report. "He does it the right way. He’s all about the business."
That might not add any zeroes to his paycheck, but it may ease concerns some owners could have about his readiness for all the attention that comes with being the top guy.
Not to Max
It's one thing to be the big man on campus one night. It's another to carry the load game after game after game through the grind of the regular season and into the playoffs.
Players who can do that are the ones who get max money more often than not. So far, Barnes has yet to rise to that standard. This past season, he scored 20 or more points six times in 66 games and did so in consecutive outings just twice. As an isolation scorer, Barnes' 0.82 points per play put him right around the middle of the pack.
Granted, that figure is similar to those posted by two current max players in Derrick Rose and Paul George, and Ryan Anderson, who could take home near-max money this summer.
But Rose was a superstar coming off an MVP season when he inked his extension with the Chicago Bulls. George signed his during the summer of 2013, shortly after his breakout campaign. And Anderson has been a productive player for the last half-decade whose niche as a sweet-shooting power forward doesn't demand a ton of individual work on the ball.
Barnes doesn't fit any of those descriptions. Nor have the Warriors asked or expected him to, what with Curry, Thompson and Green around to do the heavy lifting. Nor do they often task him with creating his own shot.
There was a time, though, when Golden State would have gladly given him that role, albeit off the bench. During the 2013-14 season, then-head coach Mark Jackson tinkered with using Barnes as a scoring sixth man, in part to pave the way for Andre Iguodala to start.
The result? Barnes shot an unsightly 39.1 percent from the field in 54 appearances as a reserve.
Since that campaign, Barnes has started consistently, save for the seven games he spent riding the pine after returning from injury this past season. Even in his prescribed role, Barnes slipped a bit in his fourth year. Beyond a slight drop in his overall three-point percentage, his accuracy from the corners cratered from 47 percent in 2014-15 to 37.8 percent this season, per NBA.com.
In theory, Barnes should be great working off the ball inside the arc. He understands how to position himself in space, can creep through a crowded floor and shouldn't have any trouble finishing at the hoop with his arachnoid limbs and quickness getting off the floor.
"He is a great cutter," Warriors head coach Steve Kerr told Lowe.
The numbers, though, tell a different story.
| Cut | 9.6% | 1.19 | 48% |
| Handoff | 1.3% | 0.8 | 43.8% |
| Off Screen | 4.1% | 0.9 | 47.2% |
| Putback | 3.6% | 1.15 | 69% |
| Transition | 19.1% | 1.13 | 55.1% |
And though Barnes has all the tools to be a brilliant defender, he still has a ways to go to put it all together. Individually, he was around league average guarding players in isolation. As part of a team scheme, he can get lost at times in defensive rotations, leaving open spot-ups.
| Isolation | 12.4% | 0.82 | 55.6% |
| Spot-Up | 22.2% | 1.14 | 14.4% |
Not even the craziness of an exploding salary cap combined with a thin free-agent market can mask Barnes' deficiencies, let alone make him look like a max-salary star.
Verdict
Whoever pays Barnes this summer will be betting not so much on his track record as on his potential. There's some element of that in any case of free agency, but for Barnes, his youth and pedigree could still have executives salivating over his upside.
It's not every day a physical marvel who can shoot and defend hits the market in his early 20s, let alone with Barnes' combination of maturity and championship experience.
But projecting max-salary stardom for a quality role player is a tall order, to say the least. Barnes hasn't dominated a playoff series, like James Harden did with the Oklahoma City Thunder before he wound up with the Houston Rockets. Nor has he gone supernova on even a few postseason occasions, as Reggie Jackson did before he left OKC.
As much as Barnes has given up in deference to Golden State's winning machine, it's tough to imagine him getting it all back (and more), to the extent of a team shelling out $23 million a year.
That's not to say Barnes won't still get paid. If DeMarre Carroll could snag a four-year, $60 million deal last summer, when the salary cap landed right around $70 million, Barnes should garner a higher annual take—say, $18-20 million—with the cap due to shoot north of $90 million, per USA Today's Jeff Zillgitt.
Much more than that wouldn't make a whole lot of sense for Golden State, which will also have to pay Festus Ezeli this summer and brace for Curry's bank-breaking payday in 2017.
It wouldn't be prudent for another team to extend itself that far for Barnes, especially with the Warriors holding matching rights over their restricted free agent. But if anyone is going to discover the true depth of his talents, it's not going to be the team that has him stuck in the pecking order behind two or three bona fide All-Stars.
Stats per NBA.com and Basketball-Reference.com unless otherwise cited.
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