Analysis of the Best and Worst Contracts in the NBA [OC]

Who has the best contract in the NBA? It's a topic that's been addressed over and over and over again. What always bothered me about these rankings were the lack of rigor and the general lack of value given to long-term deals. With the cap rising so much in the coming seasons, accounting for this cap rise is important when evaluating long-term deals. Using 538's CARMELO model, I set out to find the best and worst contracts in the NBA.

(Important Note: The CARMELO model does not have any data from this year. All projections were made using data up to the 2014-15 season. Any rookie projections are based on college performance. There are no projections for overseas rookies (Sorry, no Kristaps here).

Player's salaries were taken from Basketball Reference. I created a database that contained a player's projected WAR and upside WAR for each year he was under contract.

To generate the value of a player, I took a mix of his projected WAR (75%) and his upside WAR (25%). Here is a plot showing the total value a player is projected to produce vs. the total amount they are owed over the course of their contract.

While that plot may give us some insight into the quality of contracts, I wanted to know which player was producing the most given how much he was being paid in relation to the salary cap. As player's contract's value is not directly tied to the $ figure they are making, but rather to the portion of the salary cap they are taking up, thus all calculations involving contracts were done in the proportion of the salary cap they are going to take up.

Projections for the salary cap:

2015-16: $70MM
2016-17: $89MM
2017-18: $108MM
2018-19: $100MM
2019-20: $102MM

A simple linear regression (2015-16 projected value on 2015-16 salary) produced an equation that allowed me to create an expected value for a player with any given portion of the salary cap. Every player's value over the life of their contract was compared to their expected value, which I called Quality of Contract, or QC. Basically, QC is a measure of how much more value a player delivers compared to what you would expect them to deliver based on how much they are getting paid. (Distribution of QC).

Here's a plot of amount due over the course of the contract vs. QC.

So graphs are fun visualizations, but where's the list of the best and worst contracts?

BEST CONTRACTS:

Rank	Player	QC
1	Anthony Davis	31.74
2	James Harden	23.16
3	Stephen Curry	21.45
4	Elfrid Payton	19.13
5	Marcus Smart	18.50
6	Kawhi Leonard	18.31
7	Russell Westbrook	14.37
8	Jusef Nurkic	13.91
9	D'Angelo Russell	12.84
10	Karl-Anthony Towns	11.01

Okay, yeah, that makes sense...wait, D'Angelo Russell?? You gotta be kidding me. Well, this is a limitation of CARMELO, because CARMELO loves D'Angelo Russell.

What about the worst contracts?

WORST CONTRACTS:

Ranking	Player	QC
1	Chris Bosh	-27.44
2	Enes Kanter	-22.36
3	Carmelo Anthony	-22.01
4	Goran Dragic	-18.01
5	Tristan Thompson	-17.18
6	LaMarcus Aldridge	-15.77
7	Omer Asik	-15.48
8	Tony Parker	-15.22
9	Brandon Knight	-14.81
10	Brook Lopez	-14.62

So there you have it, Chris Bosh has the worst contract in the NBA. As I'm sure you'd expect, CARMELO hates Chris Bosh. No surprise that we see Kanter, Thompson, and Asik on this list, as they pop up on most lists.

Any thoughts on the model or really anything is encouraged. Please, pick me apart.

(Note: The calculation of player value undoubtedly the most questionable part of the model. Is giving 25% of a player's value to his 90th percentile scores in WAR too much? Perhaps, but many NBA teams seem to value upside when trading and signing players, so it seemed like a fair portion to me. However, this is definitely the area in which I could be convinced to change a player's value.)

R script and CSV here.