The Orlando Magic were relatively inactive during free agency, deciding instead to focus on their own players and core. They still added some key players.
Trying to figure out whether a player is meeting production expectations commensurate to salary is one of the great mysteries left in NBA analytics. Aside from trying to predict injuries (read Zach Lowe of Grantland’s latest post on that), predicting potential value is soemthing many people smarter than you or I are constantly working on.
It is really freaking hard to predict future events with only past data to go off of. Almost impossible.
This edition of our analysis of value on the Magic’s roster than is going to take on a bit of a different tone. It is too difficult for our purposes to try and project with statistical precision how guys will interact and how these new players will play on their new team.
Frankly, it might be somewhat hard to pin all this down or make any kind of accurate prediction.
To get a brief glimpse into value, we are going to use a rudimentary measure and simply compare and contrast production and salary. As I noted in the introduction, I took down all the salaries and PER from the 2015 season from Basketball-Reference and put them in a table. I found that the relationship between PER and $/PER is somewhat linear (a relatively strong correlation) which can give us some idea of what kind of proportion PER and salary should be in. Largely, this is an effort to compare and contrast whether the Magic are getting adequate production for the value they are paying.
There is no perfect measure for this so these conclusions are going to be somewhat grayer and more difficult to decipher.
We are breaking this down into three groups — the reserve players, the newcomers and the starting lineup (we will tackle them more in depth). We tackled the reserve players in the introduction. Here are the newcomers.
Next: C.J. Watson