Reasonable + Fair Contracts =/= Good Contracts

[BballTim]

Your logic is flawed in that there are very few teams that have every player that is on a contract where they exceed the expectations of that contract. Looking at every contract individually is the wrong way to go about it. You want to judge it on a team basis. Boston has some players on fair contracts like Bradley and Green. But they also have players that either are performing or will perform above the value of the contract. They also have players that are grossly overpaid. All in all, the Celtics are pretty average in this regard.

What you gotta attempt to do is sign a player at a level you think is fair and then hope he plays above the value of the contract. I think that's what Danny did with Green and Bradley. I think Green has been about at value and let's hope Bradley continues to develop and his contract looks like a bargain.

The point is that most of the time you're better off going after players that you KNOW are underrated, rather than getting a player at market value and simply HOPING that they outperform their contract.

For example, the Houston Rockets knew what they were getting when they went after James Harden. His value wasn't a mystery to anyone who actually knows how stats work, even as far back as the 2011-2012 season:

http://wagesofwins.com/2012/02/02/james-harden-the-nbas-best-2-guard/

But apparently the rest of the league was like durrr he comes off the bench durr Kobe is the best player evar because he scores the most points.

There are plenty of players out there like that, if you only know where the look. In fact, the majority of teams can improve their rosters simply by eliminating the REALLY BAD players with mediocre players that can be picked up from the D-League. Or, you can just stop playing them.

That's not actually a good assessment of James Harden's value around the league before he went to Houston, but I'm glad to see that you're still jocking Wages of Wins like a Jehovah Witness.

I guess I'll get off their jock when they stop being ridiculously right about things, like the Spurs not being close to being "outside of their window" following the 2011-2012 playoffs, when everybody was saying they were cooked:

http://wagesofwins.com/2012/10/18/the-bad-news-about-the-san-antonio-spurs/

(keep in mind that not only were they saying that the Spurs weren't cooked, but that they would actually be BETTER in 2012-2013, which is the opposite of what 99% of pundits were saying)

Or I'll stop when they stop being creepy accurate regarding draft picks:

http://wagesofwins.com/2013/05/21/how-did-the-spurs-get-a-player-like-kawhi-leonard/

The point is it's just funny how bad conventional basketball logic and GM's hold up in the face of win shares, so I guess I'll stop jocking it when people admit that Jeff Green and Avery Bradly are bad according to ws and maybe that's why we had 25 wins last season.

  I thought someone posted something before the season started where wages of wins predicted we'd win 40 games or so.

1) It was 35 wins

2) It assumed average production from Jeff Green (.100 ws/48) while he underperformed (actual ws/48 was .57) and also assumed that Rondo would be back earlier and healthier than he was (.54 ws/48, as opposed to his career average of .130).

  So. not ridiculously right or creepily accurate in the only prediction that they made that I saw.

[yoursweatersux]

Like the title suggests, the main point of this comment is to highlight the fact that paying someone their market value does very little to give your team an edge. In fact, in a perfectly rational and accurate market, if every team paid players exactly what they were worth you would by definition end up with a team that wins 42 games and loses 42 games.

I understand the allure of a moneyball approach to roster building, but it really isn't the be-all and end-all of the sports executive's playbook.

In the scenario that you describe, there would likely be any number of different win/loss ratios for a few reasons. Firstly, if you're going to go with the numbers approach, you have to accept that basketball is a stochastic system (wins and losses are to a large extent probabilistic), so while win/loss ratios may be normally distributed with .500 as the mean, in most permutations every team will not end up at exactly .500.

More importantly though, you are ignoring the effects of gameplan, chemistry, and coaching. In this scenario, the Spurs probably still win the Championship, because their front office is going to assemble a team that makes sense, and Popovich is going to have them playing the right way. This is exactly what Danny is trying to do with Stevens and his free agent signings. Putting together a market-value team is not necessarily a ticket to failure as long as your pieces harmonize and your coach has them playing to their full potential.

I actually fully agree with what your saying. Obviously things like team chemistry, coaching, and cohesion can be complimentary to moneyball style roster-building, and one doesn't have to be done at the expense of the other.

I honestly think that a team needs both in order to win a ring, and I can't think of a single team that managed to win a championship without a stacked roster. Even the 2005 Pistons had Ben Wallace and Chauncey Billups in their primes getting paid 5 mil apiece. That's ridiculous