[Quick Hit] 2 Ways to Analyze a Montrezl Harrell Max Contract
One of this year’s biggest free agents is Montrezl Harrell. Though he didn’t start, Montrezl was extremely effective in his limited minutes. Is a Montrezl Harrell max contract incoming? We are going to tackle this question two ways. First, we’ll try to find those players Montrezl is most comparable to in order to see what they’ve gotten paid. Then, we’ll adopt some ideas from our article about valuing players via win shares to determine how much Montrezl is actually worth.
Answering this question in these two ways attacks the contract valuation from two viewpoints:
- How much have NBA team’s paid players at Montrezl’s production level in the past?
- How much is Montrezl actually worth?
Considering both these ideas should let us get a pretty accurate idea of what Montrezl is in for this off season. We hope to answer: Is a Montrezl Harrell max contract imminent?
Finding Montrezl Harrell’s Stat Comparison
One of the easiest ways to determine how much a player will get paid in free agency is to find a similar player and figure out what they got paid. So, first we set up some analysis to compute Montrezl Harrell’s ‘comp’. Note: In this era of position-less basketball, we won’t take into account any position or size based stats in finding a player comp. Rather, we are going for a player comp based purely on production.
So, we wrote a small script to find the player who, in 2019-2020, had the most similar stats to Montrezl Harrell. We measured how similar every player was to Montrezl in the major box stats: rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, and points. Then, for every NBA player we computed how similar their box score stats were to Montrezl’s.
In order to accurately find comparisons, we made sure to ‘normalize’ the difference in each stat. A difference of 10 in points scored is much different than a difference of 10 in rebounds. Moreoever, we decided to use every player’s ‘per 36’ stats to account for any differences attributable just to different numbers of minutes played.
Who Were the Doppelgangers?
Montrezl Harrell’s best comparison on a per-36 minute basis in 2019-2010 is Christian Wood. Look how eerily similar their stats are form 2019-2020.
Player | Rebounds | Assists | Steals | Blocks | Points |
Montrezl Harrell | 9.2 | 2.2 | 0.8 | 1.5 | 24.1 |
Christian Wood | 10.6 | 1.6 | 0.9 | 1.5 | 22.0 |
Brandon Clarke | 9.6 | 2.2 | 0.9 | 1.3 | 19.4 |
Kristaps Porzingis | 10.7 | 2.0 | 0.8 | 2.3 | 23.1 |
Lamarcus Aldridge | 8.0 | 2.6 | 0.7 | 1.8 | 20.5 |
Serge Ibaka | 11.0 | 1.9 | 0.7 | 1.1 | 20.5 |
Pascal Siakam | 7.5 | 3.5 | 1.0 | 0.9 | 23.4 |
However, because of age and the fact that these guys just got paid their new contracts let us focus in on Porzingis and Siakam.
Both of these players are max-contract players who just began their second contracts. They are about a year ahead of Montrezl Harrell and have almost indistinguishable per-36 stats. These facts would seem to indicate that Montrezl Harrell is about to get the max contract because other NBA teams have valued this level of production at this age to be max-contract worthy. By this metric, a Montrezl Harrell max contract seems to be on its way.
Win Share Valuation Refresher
Perhaps the best way to value a player is to ask: how many wins does this player give me? Since we can’t know the answer to this question, a good surrogate to use is a player’s win share. Again, because we want to get rid of any inconsistencies that arose because of how much the Clippers decided to play Montrezl, we are going to look at win shares per 48 which normalizes a player’s contributed wins per minute they played. All data from basketball-reference.
In 2019-2020, Montrezl Harrell’s win shares per 48 was 0.191 which was the 21st best mark in the NBA this year. Let’s look at some other players win share data from the past few years and see how that translated into contract dollars.
- In 2018-2019, Pascal Siakam recorded 0.175 WS48 and got the max the following off-season.
- In 2018-2019, D’Angelo Russell recorded 0.091 WS48 and got almost $30M/yr
- In 2015-2016, Andre Drummond recorded 0.133 WS48 and got the max.
- In 2017-2018, Joel Embiid put up 0.155 WS48 and got a max.
What can one conclude from this? Drummond and Embiid both had worse production than Montrezl Harrell at the center position but still got max deals. If a team is signing him to be their center, then he certainly has the production to warrant a max contract.
The Verdict: Montrezl Harrell Max Contract
Our analysis seems to indicate that YES, Montrezl Harrell is both worth the max contract and he is likely to get a max contract from someone.
One important thing to remember in all of our analysis is that we used box score data to see how much Montrezl Harrell was worth. Montrezl, by virtue of being the sixth man of the year, may have played more of his minutes against non-starter-level players than the comparisons we drew. Does this indicate that Montrezl’s stats are inflated? That is for you (and NBA GMs) to decide.
The Cap
Another consideration is the free agency market. Everyone remembers the 2016 free agency. The NBA instituted a one-time cap spike that gave every team a lot of available cash to spend. Guys like Timofey Mozgov got $16M/yr. The salary cap increase has a huge impact on who gets paid what because it determines the amount of free money to be spent.
The cap this year is going up about 5% which is about normal. However, there is a thought that reduced revenue due to shortened seasons and lack of fans may make teams less likely to want to go into the luxury tax. A free agency without much money could very well lead to less contracts being handed out.
However – all things considered – Montrezl Harrell is probably worth a max contract and will likely be given one this offseason.
