Most people's reaction to Kawhi Leonard's five-year, $90 million max contract with the San Antonio Spurs earlier this month was that he just got paid.
Well, the minds at ESPN's FiveThirtyEight.com are not most people. They reason that no matter how much top players in the NBA make, they are underpaid. That includes Leonard's max deal and they have worked out the math on why that is.
Using a beta version of a pay scale model they devised, called CARMELO, and looking at the contracts that some of the NBA's top free agents signed since July 1, FiveThirtyEight breaks down the math on why the league's star players are underpaid.
FiveThirtyEight estimated Leonard's Wins Above Replacement (WAR)—a metric which tries to summarize a player's total contributions to their team in one stat—to be 54.6 over the length of his five-year deal. From that they say his "fair salary" should be approximately $45 million per season, while accounting for salary cap swells.
Multiplying nearly $45 million by five seasons gives Leonard a true value of $224 million. Take that and subtract the $90 million that he'll really make over the life of his current deal and FiveThirtyEight reasons that the 2015 Defensive Player of the Year is underpaid by a whopping $134 million. LeBron James, widely regarded as the best basketball player on the planet, is underpaid by $57 million, according to the same formula.
Similarly, the website put the same CARMELO pay scale model to the test, crunching numbers on other top free agents (Jimmy Butler, DeAndre Jordan, and Kevin Love to name a few), before coming up with their totals.
Of this summer's free-agent signings, FiveThirtyEight also calculated that 10 of the 16 max-deal signees through July 12 will generate a positive return on investment for their respective teams. They were also able to deduce that young, inexperienced players are also underpaid, while middle-class players are overpaid.
While it's head-scratching to put a five-year, $90 million contract and underpaid in the same sentence, we must say that there's plenty of logic to FiveThirtyEight's pay scale model.
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