he should be applauded....but not paid 36 million right after surgery when no other teams were offering him anything close to that.....kinda reminds me of another player Ainge just overpaid for
And you know that ... how?
Seems in hindsight Green's not even close to overpaid relative to his peers.
let's look at some pretty crude stats, just for context. i don't mean this to be the final say in this discussion, but instead to give one way of viewing the question of green being overpaid.
there are about 450 slots for players in the nba (15 people x 30 teams) and only 150 for starters (5 people x 30 teams).
lets shift the chaff from the grain for a moment and only compare green as a starter by position in the nba. there are only 30 slots each for starting pf and sf, his two positions. so, imperfect as this is, let's see how green ranks among those positions in terms of salary.
green currently makes $9.2 million. that would rank him as the 12th highest paid sf in the league and the 13th highest paid pf. so he is paid more than than many other players for those positions, but his pay is not among the leaders.
overall, he ranked 65th in salary in the nba. there are 150 starter slots in the nba, meaning comparatively in this context his salary, again, is more than many other starters, but not among the leaders.
basically, green is being paid slightly above league mean for his positions.
now let's see his stats and see whether they match his "slightly above mean salary."
as a small forward:
in pts/game green ranked 8th in the league.
in rbs/game green ranked 22nd in the league. (and 5th on the celtics!)
in assists green ranked 21st in the league.
for scoring, green is providing a return higher than his salary ranking - 8th in points, 12th in salary. but in rbs and assists, no matter how you stack it up, he does not provide a good return on the dollar.
when i compared jeff's ranking with league and pf averages the findings are quite similar for pts/rbs/assts. (among pf, green ranks 39th in rebounds.)
my conclusion? jeff is overpaid for his total production, but not terribly so. his salary doesn't kill the celtics so i can live with it.
edited for generally stupid typos.
That analysis sounds reasonable from a fan perspective, but it is probably not how the NBA sets the market for salaries.
You have to consider tenure in the NBA in the sense that first off, you have to remove all players at the position who are still on rookie contracts. Right off the bat that raises the average cost at the position.
Chandler Parsons looked like a massive bargain last year, playing for his initial deal. Now he is on a 15M contract -- is he overpaid for what will likely be similar production? Or is he paid appropriate for his tenure and contract class? In 2 years, the salary cap is expected to be much, much higher and both mid-level and max salaries (which are based on percentages of cap) will be much, much higher. How will his deal look then?
Also, the rankings for production are not just going to be on simple per-game rates. Total games and minutes played are important numbers to GMs and especially owners. Green played the 15th most minutes and scored the 25th most total points in the NBA last year (6th most minutes and 7th most total points among SFs). The NBA is an aggregate revenue entertainment business. Those numbers mean that he was a significant contributor to the entertainment product that they sold.
Of the 6 SFs who scored more total points than Jeff Green last year, four were on max contracts, being paid at least twice as much (Durant, Carmelo, Lebron & Gay). One of the other two was paid comparably, at 8.6M (T. Young). The other player, the only one getting paid a lot less still on his rookie deal, was just signed to a max extension starting at 15.9M (Paul George).
And, of course, defensive value is important, too - though frustratingly hard to easily quantify.
All these things and others are important factors that go into how GMs arrive at a value for a player.
agree again. such as rebounding. lets factor that into this equation and see where green comes up. his scoring is a strength, as i pointed out. but when we expand our analysis beyond scoring green's performance raises interesting questions.
Certainly. And Green's rebounding numbers have been way less than impressive.
But I think these particular players are paid primarily for their point production.
Green came over from OKC as a mediocre (not bad, not good) rebounder on both offense and defense.
Under Doc Rivers and Brad Stevens, his Defensive Rebounding rates have stayed the same (between 13-14% DRB%), but his ORB rates dropped like a rock (from about ~4.6% consistently at OKC to 3.0% his first full season with Doc and then to 2.1% under Stevens this last year).
This indicates pretty strongly that ORBs, at least, are heavily influenced by the coaching philosophies. So, I'm not sure how heavily those would then be weighted in player valuations.
His contract was signed with the history of slightly higher rebounding numbers at OKC (mainly because of the much higher ORB%) and he was immediately applied in a system that was ORB-phobic (Doc's famous lack of prioritization of ORBs) that dropped his numbers in that particular area.
It should also be noted that Green's rebounding efficiency as measured against rebounding _chances_ by Synergy's tracking data were actually pretty decent last year at 58.3% (For comparison, Sullinger was 60.0%, Humphries was 56.2%). His rebounding _totals_ were mediocre because his rebounding _chances_ were mediocre. This is probably because he was used so much on the perimeter (taking a career-high number of 3PT shots in particular).
Topic: jeff green-heroic playing in shadows (Read 6161 times)