While plenty of well-intentioned Boston Celtics and NBA fans complain about how much some players they see as underperforming are making, the truth is that with the artificial limit on player compensation created by the luxury tax and other similar mechanism’s in the league’s collective bargaining agreement, many players in the association are actually underpaid.
To calculate the degree of that underpayment, HoopsHype’s Alberto De Roa put together a metric called “Real Value” that was designed to, as HoopsHype analyst Frank Urbina writes, allocate “earnings just based on performance on the court.” In other words, the “only constraint is that salaries are distributed taking into account how much NBA teams spent on player contracts each season.”
