SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH – JANUARY 30: Nickeil Alexander-Walker #9 of the Minnesota Timberwolves handles … [+]
After being viewed as more of a secondary asset in a three-team deal, Nickeil Alexander-Walker impressed in his audition with the Minnesota Timberwolves — so much so that the team signed him to a two-year, nine million dollar contract in the Summer of 2023. Since then, Alexander-Walker has been on one of the most team-friendly contracts in basketball. However, all contracts must eventually come to an end, and this offseason, that is what will happen with Alexander-Walker’s wonderful deal.
Given his status as a credible two-way wing in a league where this archetype is in high demand, Alexander-Walker will be a hot commodity in free agency.
But how much is too much for this veteran shooting guard? In this article, we are going to look at three different ways to quantify Alexander-Walker’s production into a dollar amount in order to figure out what his next contract should look like.
Method #1: A Revised Version of Seth Partnow’s Formula
In his book, “The Midrange Theory,” current NBA analyst 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 (we discuss this more in-depth in an article we wrote on Jakob Poeltl in 2022).
Unfortunately, Real-Adjusted Plus-Minus (RAPM) — a major component in the formula — is no longer available. So, we’ve revised Partnow’s formula a bit (as you can see from an offseason article we wrote here).
The website Dunks & Threes has a statistic called Estimated Wins (EW). And if Alexander-Walker continues at his current pace, he’ll have provided 3.9 EW this season. Next year, with a salary cap maximum being estimated to be around 154.6 million dollars, a single win will “cost” roughly 3.8 million dollars.
Based on those two numbers, Alexander-Walker should make about 14.8 million dollars next season (roughly 9.6% of the salary cap).
Method #2: The Similarity Score Tool
The emerging website CraftedNBA has a Similarity App feature that allows you to compare any player season to one of the 6,500 seasons in their database (which goes all the way back to the 1977-78 season).
It uses a variety of advanced statistics to compile a list of the most similar seasons to the searched player since 1977. Based on that query, here are the five seasons most comparable to Alexander-Walker’s 2024-25 campaign.*
(*Sidebar: For this search, we filtered it so it would only include seasons after 1990 since it can be hard to find reliable salary data from the years prior to that.)
Some key context to add here. Patrick Beverley and Jevon Carter were considered to be vastly underpaid at the time they were under those contracts (like Alexander-Walker is right now). Meanwhile, Andrew Wiggins was viewed as grossly overpaid relative to his production.
The two most comparable contracts here are Kevin Huerter and Boris Diaw. If Alexander-Walker were to make between 11.5-15.6% of the salary in 2025-26, he would be making between 17.8 and 24.1 million dollars that season.
Method #3: Looking At Recent Precedent
Since the NBA and the National Basketball Player’s Association (NBPA) recently agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement, the only offseasons that compare to the financial landscape we’ll be dealing with this free agency period are the ones from the last two years. So, let’s focus on similar examples from those two cycles.
The three contracts signed during that time by wirey, defensive-first wings of a similar caliber to Alexander-Walker are listed below here:
If Alexander-Walker made an amount in this range (6.2-14%), he would make between 9.6 and 21.6 million dollars.
It is worth noting that Herbert Jones wasn’t the prestige of player he is considered to be now when he inked that contract, and Caleb Martin’s group has been criticized for how they negotiated his deal. So, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope’s % of the salary cap is probably the most useful of these useful of these case studies.
The Bottom Line
Through our three methods, we have determined that Alexander-Walker’s next contract should pay him between 14 and 24 million dollars in 2025-26.
On the surface, that may seem like a lot, especially given where he was at with his last contract. However, high-teens/low-twenties is about the going rate for a starting-caliber player. And despite only starting in 18.5% of his 368 career games to this point, that is exactly the type of producer Alexander-Walker has been over the last two years for Minnesota.
