Which NBA Teams Get the Most Bang for Their Free-Agency Buck?
Sometimes, you only get what you pay for. Sometimes, you're the Miami Heat... or the San Antonio Spurs.
This is sort of a data-dump — or at least, a chart-dump — post…
With NBA teams officially able to start negotiating with free agents on Sunday, I thought it might be interesting to dig into which teams have gotten the most surplus value out of free agency for each season in Spotrac’s database, which goes all the way back to the summer of 2011.
Here’s how it works: For each contract in the Spotrac data, they list the share of the salary cap represented by the deal’s average annual value. After making adjustments for each year’s overall free-agent environment, as well as whether the deal was a re-signing (returning to the same team) or an external addition, this AAV-to-cap ratio can be used in a regression model to predict how many Estimated RAPTOR Wins Above Replacement a player would be expected to produce in each season of the deal on average.
And in turn, that can be used to look for the players who had the biggest gaps between their actual and expected production:
The NBA contracts that most exceeded expectations
(A few important notes: This includes WAR — per 82 team games — produced for all NBA teams during the contract, not just the team that originally signed the contract. Everything is from the perspective of when the contract was signed, so the data also includes years in which the original contract may have been voided or altered; the same season may be included under multiple player entries on the list. And for active contracts, only the completed years are considered when calculating actual and expected WAR.)
With all of that said, there are a few interesting observations to glean from the results. Re-signings tend to provide the highest free-agency surplus value; led by Nikola Jokic’s 2018 contract extension, they represented nine of the Top 10 (and 15 of the Top 18) if we sort the overall list above. But they also provide the lowest values — each of the bottom five contracts were also re-signings.1 This makes sense when you consider the CBA rules that allow teams to extend their own players for more years and more dollars than external free agents. Make a good bet on your core players, it pays off very well… but sometimes those bets can also go wrong.
Among the surplus values of externally acquired free agents, Jimmy Butler’s original deal with the Miami Heat from 2019 was the best by far. We’d expect a 4-year non-re-signing worth an AAV 32.3 percent of the cap that offseason to yield 5.8 WAR per year, or 23.1 WAR over the life of the contract. Instead, Butler created 11.4 WAR per season, or 45.5 in total — a surplus of 22.4 WAR. We’ll see below that this kind of thing is Miami’s stock-in-trade, one of the reasons why Pat Riley and his brain trust have a reputation as one of the game’s shrewdest front offices.
One more note before we get to the teams: Sometimes you can be on the high end and the low end of the rankings at different phases of your career. Consider Bradley Beal — whose current deal (originally signed by Washington, but now Phoenix’s problem) is regarded as maybe the ugliest in the NBA. His surplus value through 2 years (-6.1 WAR) is tracking to make the 10 worst deals on our list. But Beal’s previous max deal from 2016 was one of the best surplus values on our list!
Anyway, let’s also explore this data by teams, broken out by external acquisitions, re-signings and all free agent deals:
Thirteen years of NBA free agency winners and losers
When we exclude re-signings, the Heat are indeed the team that have gotten the most total surplus value out of free-agent shopping over the years. (And remember, this data starts in the 2011 offseason, so it doesn’t even include LeBron’s Decision and Chris Bosh’s arrival).2 Butler carries a lot of that load, but they also are the kings of getting solid value out of players who make up a marginal share of the cap.
The best total surplus value, though, belongs to the San Antonio Spurs if we include both external free agent acquisitions and internal contract extensions. By re-signing Kawhi Leonard, Danny Green and Manu Ginobili (multiple times), Tim Duncan, Jakob Poeltl and plenty of others to cost-effective deals — even granting that Kawhi forced his way out of San Antonio before the deal was up — the Spurs got massive surplus value from that category of free agent. That, in turn, was the main factor elevating the Spurs to the top of the overall free-agency value list.
Of course, it helps to be great at drafting and developing talent, with an all-time coach in Gregg Popovich to bring everything together. Extending internal talent only works as a killer strategy if your internal talent is good to begin with. But for what it’s worth, surplus from extensions explains more of the variation in overall free-agency value added than surplus from external signings.
Either way, as we look ahead to 2024’s free agency scene, it’s worth thinking about which franchises will continue their trend from the past decade-plus, and who might make good decisions to turn their fortunes around — or blunders to set themselves back for a while.
Filed under: NBA, Statgeekery
With apologies to Klay Thompson, whose 2019 contract extension ranks last because he missed multiple seasons of it — and wasn’t the same player production-wise by RAPTOR on the other side of his injuries.
Although, because Bosh and James were sign-and-trade deals, the Spotrac data might have included them under the respective ledgers of the Raptors and Cavs anyway.