Fact or Fiction: The NBA’s 2024 free-agency class was a dud

Paul George, the 76ers’ big-ticket signing this summer, is off to a disappointing start in Philadelphia. (Photo by Mitchell Leff/Getty Images)

Each week during the 2024-25 NBA season, we will take a deeper dive into some of the league’s biggest storylines in an attempt to determine whether trends are based more in fact or fiction moving forward.

[Last week: The NBA needs more 3-point specialists]

Fact or Fiction: The NBA’s 2024 free-agency class was a dud

No team spent more on salary this past summer than the Philadelphia 76ers, who own the NBA’s worst record through the season’s first month — indirect evidence that the 2024 free-agency class was a bust.

Let us dive deeper into that question to see if teams managed to salvage some value.

First a reintroduction to Cost Per Win (CPW), a statistic created here in 2016 to measure the cost of each player’s contributions to a team’s success in a given season: We take the average annual value (AAV) of a player’s contract, divide it by that player’s win shares (WS) and extrapolate the data out to a full season. This provides us with an estimated account of how much teams are paying their players for each victory.

We separated the 56 free agents who changed teams over the summer into four categories: big-ticket ($12,859,001+), mid-tier ($5,183,000-$12,859,000), low-cost ($1,157,153-$5,182,999) and two-way players. It is harder to equate value across tiers. Teams expect to pay more per win for max-salaried players. Usage varies. Roles are different. Minimum-salaried players do not stabilize organizations. In fact, the addition of a high-priced free agent has been known to attract lower-cost ones, as was the case in Philadelphia.

2024 big-ticket NBA free agents

PLAYER

AAV

WS

CPW

1. DeMar DeRozan, SAC

$24,630,000

1.5

$3,003,659

2. Klay Thompson, DAL

$16,666,667

0.7

$4,355,401

3. Tobias Harris, DET

$26,000,000

1.1

$4,900,222

4. Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, ORL

$22,000,000

0.7

$6,132,404

5. Isaiah Hartenstein, OKC

$29,000,000

0.1

$56,585,366

6. Paul George, PHI

$52,896,235

0.1

$90,310,645

Eighty-eight players have registered at least a single win share through the season’s first month, and just two of them…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/fact-or-fiction-the-nbas-2024-free-agency-class-was-a-dud-175638573.html

Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-11-22 17:56:00

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.