Monday, April 19, 2010

Ball v.1.38

A few weeks back I wrote that I will start focusing my posts a lot more on defence. Today, Bryan Colangelo said that nearly every personnel decision he makes this off-season will focus on defence. Let's just assume he reads Caldeford.

Anyways, I'm only bringing this up because I want to lay out the two areas my future posts will be covering, and two things Bryan Colangelo said today have reiterated that these two areas are very important.

1. Defence & Potential Personnel Moves
2. Cap Spending, Luxury Tax & Performance

I will do some work on this second point because of recent emphasis on this by three people: Chris Bosh (in his post-mortem comments), Bryan Colangelo (same), and Michael Grange (who's touched on this subject many times in the past few weeks).

I suspect the correlation between payroll and performance is quite strong in the NBA (probably much stronger than NHL & NFL, perhaps even stronger than MLB). We will hopefully answer that question in the coming weeks.



4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great- looking forward to it.

Anonymous said...

So much for signing Marcus Camby... hello Hassan Whiteside.

Anonymous said...

I could believe the NBA has the strongest correlation of salaries to performance.

First, you'd probably have to strike the NHL and NFL from this argument as they have hard caps. The NHL to a lesser degree than the NFL.


In the NBA, I see a high correlation of spending vs. playoff seeding. But this does not mean that NBA GMs spend money wisely. Once the team reaches luxury tax territory, the teams that exceed it are ones who have reached the playoffs and have a good chance to continue the next season.

Of Hoopshype's top 30 salaried players, here are the ones who are grossly overpaid (by about 5m or more).

#1 Tracy McGrady
#3 Jermaine O'Neal
#5 Shaquille O'Neal
#8 Ray Allen
#9 Rashard Lewis
#10 Michael Redd
#12 Andrei Kirilenko
#16 Vince Carter
#17 Gilbert Arenas
#18 Zach Randolph
#23 Kenyon Martin
#26 Elton Brand
#27 Predrag Stojakovic
#28 Richard Jefferson
#29 Larry Hughes

Half of the league's highest paid players in the league aren't even worth close to what they're being paid. Or maybe there is more money in the NBA than I realize and my value judgment is off.

Teams in MLB generally do a good job of allocating money for performance. Stats are more reliable, and there are less barriers to the free agent market (no soft cap). One thing that throws a wrench into MLB's stake as the #1 correlated league is the 6 years of squatters rights (plus any minor league development) where the NBA only has 4 years tops.

Jim Rootham said...

MLB has salary arbitration. I think that is an even bigger influence on salary/performance ratios than free agency.