The 2023 free agent frenzy is largely over, and teams have committed to contracts paying players more than a billion dollars over the next five years. Lucky for the league, that billion-plus in salaries will be covered twice over by revenues.
Assigning dollar values to individual players has long been a guessing game. Executives have sought to bring science to the task, but a solution has proven elusive. Contracts are negotiated based on lots of factors beyond a player’s on-court performance, including perceived popularity, owner fan-boy/girl status, market competition, age, location, etc.
A few years back, I assembled a “salary formula,” which tries to translate on-court performance into cap dollars.