3 ways to estimate how much De'Anthony Melton should be paid this offseason

With the first day of free agency quickly approaching (June 30), I wanted to kick off a new series looking at how much potential players the Sacramento Kings could be targeting should be paid based on their past/future production.

In this series, I am going to look at three different methods (one on each slide) for estimating how much a player should be making next season. To some degree, all of these approaches are similar to the calculus front offices are doing when they are trying to ascertain the value of a particular player.

The first player I want to do this exercise with is De'Anthony Melton. As I've mentioned before, Melton would be a great option for the Kings to target if they can't retain Malik Monk. To sign him, they would need to use their Non-Taxpayer Mid-Level (which is worth about 12.9 million dollars). But is that enough to land this two-way stud? Let's go through our three methods for projecting player value and find out.

(Sidebar #1: For those wondering, I have actually conducted this exercise for Malik Monk. That article can be found here.)

Method #1: A Revised Version of Seth Partnow’s Formula

In his book, “The Midrange Theory,” NBA analyst for The Athletic and former Director of Basketball Research for the Milwaukee Bucks, Seth Partnow, discusses a formula that teams use to estimate a player’s monetary value.

In its essence, the formula involves multiplying how many points a player is “worth” by the amount a win “costs” in a given season. Unfortunately, Real-Adjusted Plus-Minus (RAPM) — a major component in the formula — is no longer available. So, I've revised Partnow’s formula a bit.

Melton's analysis is a little bit tricky because a nagging back injury has forced him to miss over half of the season and most of the playoffs. So, with this in mind, and the fact that Melton is still in his prime and has been able to stay pretty healthy in past seasons, we are going to use Melton's 2022-23 production for this method (and Method #2).

Anyway, the website Dunks & Threes has a statistic called Estimated Wins (EW). In 2022-23, Melton had 5.7 EWs. Next year, with the salary cap being estimated to be around 141 million dollars, a single win will “cost” roughly 3.4 million dollars. Based on those two numbers, Melton should make about 19.4 million dollars next season (roughly 13.8% of the salary cap).

Now, if we did that calculation for his 2023-24 season, Melton should make about 10.9 million dollars next season (roughly 7.7% of the salary cap).