Assessing value on the Orlando Magic roster: Introduction and Role Players

Finding out how to predict and assess value is the Holy Grail of NBA analytics. As the Magic begin their season, we take a deep look at one measure of value

It is the great holy grail in basketball analysis: How do you translate statistical value into a monetary figure? Can you predict what a player should be paid?

That would help solve a lot of the calculus of knowing when to let go of and keep players. How much to pay them and how much not to pay them. A lot of teams would love to know exactly how much to pay a player.

Really assessing value comes down to comparing players and figuring out whose productions is worth more or whose production is worth less or how exactly to value it. Value is not an easy thing to figure. There are a number of factors. And nothing is perfect.

And as many people like to point out, a championship is not won on a spreadsheet.

The point of this post is to look at the Magic’s roster and determine if players are producing appropriate to their salary.

There is no clear way to do this. For the last few years, I have taken a cursory look at PER as a function of salary, thinking a player’s $/PER said something about their “value” or how appropriately they were paid. It is a random and imperfect measure for sure (and for a number of reasons).

It does hold some value correct? If we are to assume PER does encapsulate a player’s total production (a dubious claim, but one that serves a purpose here), can we determine a monetary amount that player should make based on his efficiency? How much money should a player make per PER point?

So, I took down every salary from the NBA during the 2015 season using Basketball-Reference’s database (that decision was more for convenience, I usually go to Eric Pincus’ database on Basketball Insiders for my salary information). I used their PER measures too (again, more for convenience).

When comparing total salary to PER, there is virtually no correlation. That is pretty fair and not completely unexpected. There are guys getting paid a lot of money that produce very little in terms of what PER measures. They skew the numbers.

However, when comparing PER and $/PER, there is a slightly stronger correlation — a .804 correlation coefficient. That is not a perfect line, but it is a stronger correlation. It seems that this is where we want to start assessing value a bit more.

With that in mind, including the database, we can begin to compare similar salaries and determine where Magic players fit on that line and whether the Magic are getting a good bang for their buck.

And perhaps make a few predictions too.

I am going to take some things in turn here. We are going to split this up into a bit of a series, looking more closely at the value of the Magic’s bigger players — Nikola Vucevic, Victor Oladipo, Tobias Harris, Evan Fournier and Elfrid Payton. Along with some projections.

For the rest of this post, we will focus on the Magic’s role players — Devyn Marble, Channing Frye, Aaron Gordon, Andrew Nicholson and Dewayne Dedmon. We will deal with the newcomers — C.J. Watson, Mario Hezonja, Jason Smith and Shabazz Napier — in the next set before getting to essentially the starters (including Fournier in that group more to analyze his potential for receiving an extension than anything else).

OK, let’s see what we find.

Next: Aaron Gordon