Best Contracts Of The 2024-25 NBA Season

The dialogue around salaries is often misguided, but contracts are a part of the game. In a game where each franchise’s resources are limited, the best teams are the ones who get the most bang for their buck.

And while the reason we do all this is to see who the last team standing is, contracts are technically paid based on regular season production. So, with the end of the 2024-25 NBA regular season almost upon us, it feels like the right time to look back at which contracts flopped and which ones turned out to be money well-spent.

In Part One of this two-part mini-series, we highlight the best contracts from this past season.

The Methodology

In the past, we have used multiple methods to try and project how much a player should make on their next contract. Well, in this article, we are going to focus on a method inspired by Seth Partnow’s book, “The Midrange Theory.”

In his book, the former Director of Basketball Research for the Milwaukee Bucks 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.

The Website Dunks & Threes offers 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 million 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 received to the amount this exercise produced to see the disparity in how much they got paid versus what they are actually worth.

Thanks to the help of Data Scientist Fran Huzjan (@FHuzjan on Twitter), we were able to calculate the production value of every NBA player who played meaningful minutes and subtract that number from their actual salary this season – giving us the best/worst contracts of the year.

Now, there are some shortcomings to using such a simple equation for calculating a player’s value. First, we are limited to the methodology used to compute EW. As is the case with any catch-all metric, EW can only tell you how many wins a player added in their specific role on their specific team.

And second, this sort of method biases against players who struggled with injuries last season — since they weren’t on the court to help have an impact on winning. In some instances, like with players who are consistently injured, this can be helpful. But in one-off cases, where a player is uncharacteristically unhealthy for a year, this can make a player look far less valuable than they actually are (we’ll talk more about these specific examples in Part Two).

Two Types Of Great Contracts

For this part of the series, we separated the best contracts into two categories. The first one consists of all the rookie-scale deals. With the way the current CBA is structured, you can only pay young players a certain amount of money based on where they were selected in the draft. That is what makes hitting on draft picks so important. If you can evaluate talent properly, you can get a 30-million-dollar player for a third of the price.

The other group will be all the non-rookie contracts. It is much harder to get a massive disparity between production value and current salary, but when you can do it, you gain a massive strategic advantage over the field.

The Best Rookie Contracts

Now that all the background context has been established, here are the ten best rookie-scale deals in the NBA this year:

Honorable mentions: Jaylen Wells, Walker Kessler, Andrew Nembhard, Scottie Barnes, and Keegan Murray.

We told you great teams make the most of their resources. Five of the top six best rookie deals belong to players on top three teams in their respective conferences. Three of those six players are from the well-regarded 2021 Draft. There are four total 2021 guys in the top 10 when you add Cade Cunningham into the mix.

It is also insanely impressive that Victor Wembanyama managed to outplay his actual salary by 17.2 million dollars despite only playing in 46 games. If he had played 70 games, he’d have the best contract in the league (even including the non-rookie contracts).

By the way, a special shoutout to Toumani Camara, who continues to be the biggest steal of the 2023 Draft.

The Other Best Contracts

Now, here are the other ten best contracts from this season:

Honorable mentions: Luke Kornet, Jarrett Allen, Nikola Jokic, Tyus Jones, and Guerschon Yabusele.

It is yet another notch in the belt of what looks to be an MVP campaign for Shai Gilgeous-Alexander that, despite making almost 36 million dollars this year, he still has the greatest difference in production value/actual salary of any player in the association. For those wondering, his greatest competitor, three-time MVP Nikola Jokic, is outperforming his 51.4 million dollar salary by nearly 11 million dollars.

The two leading candidates for Sixth Man of the Year (Payton Pritchard and Malik Beasley) both made it into the top five, along with two of the most underrated role players in the league (Ivica Zubac and Derrick White).

It is also cool to see two undrafted guys (Scotty Pippen Jr. and Keon Ellis) and two guys who seemed to be on their way out of the league (Ty Jerome and Kris Dunn) become some of the most valuable assets in the sport by cracking the top 10.

Stay tuned for Part Two of this series to see the worst contracts of the 2024-25 season. All data is up to date as of April 3, 2025.