Written By Nicholas Penaloza and Martand Bhagavatula
Coming into the 2021-22 NBA season, many believed that the Lakers were title favorites. Although they lost key role players like Alex Caruso in the offseason, they acquired 9x All-Star Russell Westbrook, seasoned veterans like Carmelo Anthony and Dwight Howard, and spark plugs like Malik Monk and Kendrick Nunn. These acquisitions fostered incredible pre-season hype for the team, ultimately materializing in very little to date as the Lakers just got eliminated from playoff contention. There are many causes for their disappointing season but the absence of Anthony Davis is arguably the most important. Although AD returned recently, he has largely been unavailable, only playing 39 games this season. While AD certainly deserves criticism for failing to stay healthy, an argument remains that he is one of the most versatile two-way players in the NBA when healthy. However, being injury prone has cast doubt on whether AD deserves his max contract (5 years, $190 million), the 15th highest player salary this season. To answer this question, we utilized the lenses of availability and production, creating three graphs to support our argument.
AD’s salary over his ten-year career versus his availability, measured in the % of the season played
Comparing AD’s advanced player metrics with Kawhi, another injury-prone superstar
Comparing AD’s advanced player metrics with other superstars
AD’s Injury History
Throughout his 10-year career, Davis has missed approximately 23% of his regular season games due to a variety of injuries, illnesses, and soreness. His serious injuries include a stress reaction to his ankle, a fractured hand, back spasms, various knee/shoulder injuries, groin strains, MCL injuries, and multiple calf/Achilles injuries. Amongst the list of ailments, several of them have been nagging – most notably his calf/Achilles injuries that kept him out for clumps of the 2020-2021 campaign. Indeed, calf injuries are statistically very likely to recur and nag, specifically due to the constant pressure put on the injured area in every facet of the sport, as well as it being the lynchpin to leg mobility. When it comes to Achilles injuries, there’s arguably no isolated body part more important to a player’s function. It’s the primary driver of stability, explosive motion, and all (especially rapid) directional changes. The tendon takes on stress equal to over 10x your body weight, requiring that it be at full health for peak basketball performance.
While these injuries have been dispersed across his career, the past two seasons have essentially been highlighted by Davis missing extensive time. This also coincides with when he received a max contract, meaning that for the purposes of this article, the past two seasons will be isolated. In evaluating the said time period, Davis has played a mere 49% of the team’s games (including the playoffs), most notably missing key stretches of the 2020-2021 regular season, in which the Lakers finished as the 7th seed in the Western Conference, and the tail end of the First Round of the 2021 NBA Playoffs, where the undermanned Lakers squandered a 2-1 series lead to eventual Western Conference Champions Phoenix Suns.
The current season has been no different than last, as Davis has been kept out for nearly 20 games due to an MCL sprain he suffered in December 2021 and 19 games for a severe ankle sprain in February. Thus, the past two seasons have been heavily asterisked by Davis missing extensive time, with no guarantee that this trend will end as he plays out his contract.
The graph below illustrates this point, showing AD’s salary over his 10-year career alongside the percentage of games (regular season + playoffs) he played in each season. The biggest takeaway from the graph is that the years when AD was on his max are also his least “productive” years, from a games played standpoint.
How Does Davis Fare Relative to Other Max-Contract Players?
Comparing AD to other max players, he is near the top of the list when it comes to total money made while injured, and time missed relative to money made. In regards to the former, Davis is in the top 3, trailing only Kawhi Leonard and Jamal Murray. While Leonard has a reputation for missing significant time, similar to Davis, Murray suffered a torn ACL in the 2020-2021 campaign without having a significant injury history, implying that his severe injury is likely an outlier, and dubbing him “injury-prone” would be an unfair assessment. Thus, the safest person to compare Davis to, in the context of being “injury-prone”, would be Kawhi Leonard.
Using the advanced metrics of TS Add, VORP, and BPM (see glossary for explanations), Leonard trumps Davis from a production standpoint. For example, last season, utilizing TS Add, Davis presents a score of -22.7 points, demonstrating a significant dropoff in his production and presenting him as a below-average offensive player. Kawhi, on the other hand, possessed a TS Add of 105.2, indicating his superior production relative to the average NBA player (an expectation of someone playing on a maximum contract), as well as superior production relative to Davis. While Davis has returned to having a positive TS Add (20.5) this season, that number indicates him only being a slightly above average offensive player, and more importantly, pales in comparison to his own ceiling of TS Add. In the 2017-18 season, Davis yielded one of the highest TS Add’s (191.2) in NBA history.
Using VORP and BPM, which are other good representations of player value and replaceability, Davis also demonstrates considerable drop-offs, as well as relative inferiority to Leonard.
When comparing AD and Kawhi’s VORP to other superstars, AD’s subpar production becomes even more evident, especially in the 2020-21 season.
Overall, when it comes to max contract players, Davis and Leonard are in leagues of their own when it comes to being dubbed as “injury-prone”. From there, the only valid argument to warrant a player receiving a max contract despite being unavailable for significant time is that in the time that they do play, they perform at an irreplaceable level. For Davis though, that cannot be said. While statistically, he remains a narrowly above-average player, his unavailability paired with poor advanced metrics compared to other max-contract players constructs a very strong argument in favor of him not being worthy of a max contract. In a world where Davis was performing at the same level that he was prior to receiving the maximum contract, even with his existent injury issues, an argument can be made that due to his superiority over the rest of the NBA, he deserves the max contract. However, accounting for the production drop-off paired with nearly league-leading unavailability, there’s very little argument to be made in favor of Davis, leading to the ultimate conclusion that he is not worth the maximum contract he was given in the 2020 offseason.
Glossary of Terms
TS (True Shooting) Added
How many points a player scored above/below what a league-average player would’ve scored given an equal number of true shot attempts.
VORP (Value Over Replacement Player)
A box score estimate of the points per 100 TEAM possessions that a player contributed above a replacement-level (-2.0) player, translated to an average team and prorated to an 82-game season.
BPM (Box Plus-Minus)
A box score estimate of the points per 100 possessions a player contributed above a league-average player, translated to an average team.