The Best And Worst Contracts In The NBA, In 1 Chart

It’s with great sadness that we distill one of sports' most entertaining debates down to a single, live-updating X- and Y-axis.

Every year, thousands of words are spilled trying to figure out the best and worst contracts in the NBA. Is "Player X" living up the hype? How about in comparison to "Player Y"? If we’re being honest, arguing about such things is one of the best things about the sport.

So it’s with great sadness that we distill the entire entertaining debate down to a single, soulless interactive graphic.

Created for The Huffington Post by FindTheBest, a data visualization company, the graphic charts nearly every NBA player’s 2014-2015 salary against his 2014-2015 player efficiency rating (PER).

For the unexposed, PER is an all-encompassing aggregate statistic that boils down a player’s per-minute value into a single number, regardless of his height or how he plays. It’s not perfect, but it works pretty well.

The graphic updates nightly using statistics provided by the site Sports Data LLC. If you’re checking this on the day of publication, you might notice some of the players with high PERs -- e.g. the Miami Heat’s Hassan Whiteside and the Oklahoma City Thunder’s Kevin Durant -- are not on there. That’s because FindTheBest filtered out players who have played fewer than 30 games this season.

If you’re struggling with that chart, FindTheBest also created a breakdown of the top five best- and worst-value contracts in the league. As you might guess, Anthony Davis, who has the best PER in the league but is still on his rookie contract, comes in as the best value in the NBA.

And if you want to know the least valuable contract in the league, well, we’re sorry Kendrick Perkins.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot