Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images
There are a host of other huge names in the NBA that our Real Value metic believes to be overpaid. We decided to exclude them from the actual rankings because they had very valid excuses for their relatively poor Real Values in 2023-24, most of them being injury.
Reigning MVP Joel Embiid, for example, has been overpaid by $15.6 million this season, per our metric, but that’s obviously because he’s been out since early February with injury. It speaks to how great Embiid is that our metric didn’t consider him to be even more “overpaid”.
Likewise, Stephen Curry has been overpaid by $15.2 million this season but even then, his Real Value is still $36.7 million, which is an elite mark. He’s just earning $51.9 million, so the Warriors’ poor record made his Real Value/actual salary disparity look worse than it really is.
Marcus Smart ($2.3 million Real Value vs. $18.6 million actual salary) and Ben Simmons ($1.7 million Real Value vs. $37.9 million actual salary, making him the most overpaid player in the league this year, per our metric) also have legitimate injury-related reasons for such poor outputs in 2023-24, though that’s nothing new for Simmons.
Here’s hoping the big Australian guard can get healthy because people do tend to forget how great he was in his prime.
Simmons is the league’s most overpaid player this season, per Real Value, but who is second-most overpaid? That would be Zach LaVine, who has been out since mid-January and won’t return until 2024-25. Global Rating, which is where we get Real Value from, is a cumulative stat, so both players’ values were greatly hampered by how much time they missed.
