3 Most overpaid Sacramento Kings players on next season's roster
By Mat Issa
As we learned in the movie Moneyball, the best teams are the ones that can stretch a dollar the furthest. Yes, the goal is to accumulate as much well-fitting talent as possible. But you also want to do it at a price that is at/below their market value.
To do this, front offices have come up with countless formulas for estimating a player's production value. In his book, “The Midrange Theory,” Seth Partnow posited one that involved multiplying a player's impact by the value of a win in a given season.
So, in a recent article for A Royal Pain, I used a variation of this formula (explained in this article here) to identify the best contracts on the Sacramento Kings' books heading into 2024-25. Now, we are going to do the same for the worst contracts.
The Formula
The website Dunks & Threes (a statistical gold mine, by the way) has a metric called Estimated Wins (EW). As the name implies, this measure quite literally estimates how many wins a player earned for their team in a given season.
Theoretically, by multiplying this number by the amount a win is worth in a given season (3.4 in 2024-25), we can get an idea of how much they should be making next season. From there, we can compare the average annual value of the contract they are currently on to the amount this exercise produced to see the disparity in how much they are getting paid versus how much they are actually worth.
The players with the "best" contracts will have the highest positive difference between their production value and average annual salary, and the ones with the "worst" contracts will have the highest negative difference between the two.
Now, without further ado, here are the three most overpaid players on the Kings roster (based on production value).