2024 Ottobasket Arb Analysis

[higginsford]

Arb is done now and time to dig into how managers went about it! Just like last year, I pulled the salaries before and right after arbitration was applied so hopefully the data wasn’t impacted by any early cuts. I calculated the absolute and percentage differences for each player’s average salary from before and after arbitration. It’s still not split out by format - hopefully next year. Just a matter of writing the code to get league data, basically.

On to the charts! I’ll keep the commentary to a minimum here as I trust y’all paid attention to the NBA this year, can read the tables, and there are follow-up analyses I want to get done, too.

Top Player Increases by Salary

Would you believe, it’s Wemby! He received an astounding $15.31 on average in arbitration to raise his post-arb average salary to $49.84. In other words, he got hit with In other other words, he’s likely to still be an incredible steal next year and could repeat this sort of increase again. I would be very interested to learn if anyone has lead Ottoneu in arbitration received two years in a row for baseball or football.

Incredibly, Jalen Brunson might be the closest comparison as he has come in 2nd this year and last but should still be a good value in most leagues with an average salary now at $37.68. Another wild fact is that a full SIX - Wembanyama, Brunson, Haliburton, Edwards, SGA, and Banchero - of last year’s top 10 repeated. It goes to show how valuable getting in early on players that hit can be in Ottobasket.

Brunson, Anthony Edwards, and Chet Holmgren all received more in arb this offseason than last year’s leader, Tyrese Haliburton. Chet may have received more arbitration if it weren’t for certain managers having a type - he and Wemby were amazingly on the same team in all three of my leagues.

You can also see the impact of the playoffs on arbitration, with only Wemby and Sengun not making the playoffs. I wonder if this recency bias impacts the efficiency of arbitration or if learning from deep playoff runs precedes more growth the next season.

The last thing that stands out to me is that three Oklahoma City Thunder players made it, reflecting their breakout season as a team with individual performances worthy of arbitration dollars.

Top Player Increases by Percentage of Salary

Wemby again?!? I’m sure these arbitration accolades will make it onto his Basketball-Reference page.

It’s not surprising to see the maximum values for increases as a percentage of salary are not as high as last year, particularly with so many repeat appearances in the absolute differences for this year and last since they’re starting at higher numbers. However, we do have several repeat players from this year’s absolute difference table with Wemby, Chet, Brunson, J-Dub, Maxey, Sengun, and Banchero all showing up again.

The three newcomers are Jalen Johnson, Coby White, and Derrick White. Coby was the runner-up for Most Improved Player (a lot of other players in these tables show up, too) while Johnson would have received votes had he qualified for the awards. Derrick White merely filled in all the gaps for the champion Celtics and lit nets on fire during the playoffs.

Up Next

Now that I’ve got the first step of this process a little more buttoned up, I’m going to try and push this arbitration series to two new areas: a retrospective on last year’s arb targets (which I’m realizing may be a bit boring with how many repeats there are) and players who I think should have received more arbitration. Keep an eye out for those and feel free to drop suggestions!

[higginsford]

I’m going to split this into two or three posts, with the first focusing on players who maybe should have received more arbitration money and the others covering who was over-arb’d and conclusions about the big picture. This is painting in broad strokes and league context plays a big part in allocating your arb money to other teams, but hopefully we can unearth some insights. One big caveat though - Ottoneu players do not all agree on the best way to do arbitration. Just mention it in a Slack (baseball) channel with Joe Catz in there. There are several strategies that people use and my approach to it for basketball has been informed by my experience in baseball leagues. You can read more about baseball strategies here and here. It’s also a good reminder that the best arbitration strategy is simply doing it!

The main two approaches are attempting to force cuts by making players too expensive and the other is simply eliminating surplus to make those keep / cut decisions harder. The last option, which is more common in basketball than baseball (I haven’t played Ottoneu football), is to try and get ahead of surplus and allocate money to rookies who were just drafted.

Lastly, I was able to pull in the scoring type for each league and therefore create an accurately weighted average for year end value across the three scoring systems (8 categories, 2 simple, 10 traditional if I’m doing it correctly). This helps paint a more accurate picture when calculating surplus since the average salaries are inherently a weighted average across the scoring systems, so now the average salaries and the year end values are both balanced across the distribution of systems. As with any analysis pulling in my values, it’s dependent on their accuracy! If you disagree with them, that’s totally okay!

Missed Opportunities

We’re leading off with players who received some arbitration, but perhaps not enough. Of course plenty of players are going to leave arbitration with surplus value remaining, but can we be better? This first group is players who received arb, but were not part of that upper echelon (it’s about the bottom 75% of arb receivers).

Right off the bat we see the player who perhaps most confounds me - Daniel Gafford. He consistently shows up as quite valuable, and yet, I can’t get myself to really think of him as worth more than $15-18. He averaged less minutes in Dallas than in Washington, where they finally played him more than 20 minutes per game, but his efficiency was even better and he remains a solid rebounder and good shot blocker.

Jarrett Allen, Brook Lopez, and Isaiah Hartenstein also fit a similar mold as a center who is quite good but sort of quiet about it. None of them score a lot or create their own offense, but they all contribute across the board and played plenty of minutes. Hartenstein had Mitchell Robinson’s injury to credit for his breakout and I wonder if he would have received more arb money had we known he would leave for OKC. Maybe we’ll find out next offseason!

LeBron, DeMar, and Kawhi are a bit of a group themselves as they’re all aging players, but at very different salaries. LeBron showed he still has it, but the real driver behind his and Kawhi’s surplus is the considerable increase in games played last season over the previous couple. DeRozan keeps chugging along, somehow continuing to put up $60+ seasons in every year since 2014-15! It will be interesting to see how he meshes with a Sacramento group that plays faster, but had only De’Aaron Fox (35.9) and Domantas Sabonis (35.7) above 35 MPG while DDR played nearly 38 last year in Chicago.

Lastly we have Grayson Allen, D’Angelo Russell, and Donte DiVincenzo, three players who combined solid scoring with career years from behind the arc.

Moving to a percentage based approach for all players receiving arb money, we see 5 repeat names here in DDV, Allen, Hartenstein, Lopez, and Gafford. Caruso and Avdija fit as players who bumped up their scoring while shooting it better than ever before from behind the arc.

Coby White was a bona fide breakout who was more balanced as a scorer, improved as a passer, and earned Billy Donovan’s trust to play a lot of minutes. Depending on what happens in Chicago with Zach LaVine, it could be solely up to White to provide the perimeter scoring punch.

Sexton is a fascinating case as a player who crossed the 30 traditional FPPG threshold in his third year, but hadn’t played a full season since his rookie year until last year and seemed to be getting yo-yo’d by the Jazz. He broke out (again?) last year, forcing his way into the starting lineup in December and not looking back. He thrived in Utah’s great offensive environment and scored very efficiently while upping his assists to career highs.

Lastly, we have Miles Bridges. He proved he can still play basketball after a year off.

Moving back to using post-arb surplus as our metric, but this time with all players and not a restricted pool. Only Anthony Davis and Rudy Gobert have their first appearances here as they fit in just between the band of players excluded from our previous table but not making the top 10 in total arb received. They both showed how effective they can be when healthy as they both played 76 games, more than either had played since 2018-19. If I had to guess, their relatively high salaries combined with that skepticism about repeating that level of availability were the main reasons they didn’t receive more arb.

What stands out most to me with this table is how long it might take for a league to eat up all of the surplus value for young players that truly hit. If Chet, J-Dub, Wemby, and Brunson continue to produce at that level or higher, it could take two or three more years to get them to be neutral assets. And that’s using the season long numbers for Wemby, though he averaged 52.9 traditional FPPG after Zach Collins left the starting lineup on 12/8. Only Jokic, Embiid, Giannis, SGA, Luka, and AD eclipsed that number on a per game basis last year. Get ready to open up some space for Cooper Flagg, Ace Bailey, Dylan Harper, Nolan Traore, and company this fall!

[higginsford]

Talent über alles?

Our first table is the players who received the most arbitration money and were negative surplus after the arbitration was assigned. Immediately the level of talent in the table stands out - every single player in the table has been an All Star. Talent wins, and Ottoneu players continue to bet on it even if the numbers don’t seem to agree (again, maybe the numbers are wrong!).

The other things that stand out among this group are playoff performance and health. Anthony Edwards played 79 games, but no other player appeared in more than 70 and several didn’t even hit the 60 game mark. However, we saw Edwards, Haliburton, Doncic, and Brown really open eyes during the postseason while Embiid put up impressive scoring numbers in his sole playoff series after a dominant regular season that was limited to 39 games. Mitchell, Murray, and Booker are all known for performing in the postseason, though Murray was hobbled by a calf injury and Booker’s Suns were swept by Minnesota.

Morant only played 9 games due to suspension and injury, but he was at a discount going into the season. However, he doesn’t project to be a big surplus player next year for me due to his lack of availability - his career high in games played is 67 and that was his rookie season.

Lastly we have Markkanen, whose value is dinged by the fact that Utah has shut him down late in the season the last two years to help their tank. He’s the main star in the rumor mill right now, so it’ll be interesting to see if he is moved or is destined to sit the last couple weeks of the season again next year.

Injured talent is again the theme for this group with Cunningham and Towns leading the way with 62 games played each. Four of the 10 players were replacement level over the course of the season and two more had single digit value, though all but Anunoby averaged at least 30 traditional FPPG in the games they did play. If you have these players when healthy, it adds another dimension to your squad and when they get hurt, there often isn’t a ton of incentive to cut. You could get lucky and start a cascade of cuts and re-auctions, but often it’s easier to replace one of these players by attaching a prospect and trading them away to a team at the bottom of the standings for someone just a half tier or so worse rather than playing the waiver wire.

I’ll also note that five of the 10 received $1 or less in arbitration, so it’s entirely possible that they were simply the best option on a bad team rather than a league-wide target. We’ll have to wait and see how healthy these players are next year. Some of them could put together 75 game seasons at 35 or 40 or 45 TFPPG and be prime targets for more arb next season.

[higginsford]

Conclusions

Ottobasket managers seem to value youth and talent highly when assigning arbitration, a formula that I certainly can’t argue with too much. If there’s one player group that seems undervalued by the group, it’s the solid big men who are unlikely to make leaps into the upper echelons of the NBA and may not be even the second option for their team’s offense, but still produce consistently enough to be high value players.

I think it’s possible managers get too caught up in postseason hype, as exemplified in Tyrese Haliburton and Anthony Edwards getting arb’d past their regular season value. It’s harder to make this argument with Haliburton because he was on track to exceed his salary by quite a bit if he hadn’t gotten hurt, but injuries happen. They were both excellent in the postseason, showing their game can translate and leading their teams deep into the playoffs. Edwards in particular upped his game literally across the board with more points (at better efficiency), rebounds, assists, and stocks per game with only a small uptick in turnovers. But it also came in 40.6 minutes per game, an increase of 5.5 minutes over his regular season numbers and a number he’s basically a lock to not reach next season.

We see that most of the high-arb’d players still retained surplus value once it was assigned, and only Haliburton and Edwards received more than $4 of arb while being negative surplus post-arb. Ideally a few of the dots to the left of $0 post-arb surplus would shift down while those to the right shift up, but overall managers seem to be doing well. Although the post-arb surplus for players receiving arb was -$309, much of that was tied up in the players in the last table of the previous post. I don’t have numbers to support it, but I would guess it’s more common for a high salary player to end up with a very low value season - typically due to injury - than it is for a low salary player to break out to the extent they are +$50 or +$60 in surplus after arb.

Other Misses

In terms of players who weren’t arb’d while being surplus players, there weren’t many! Only 10.6% of post-arb surplus players - 9 in total - did not receive any arbitration, and they weren’t exactly a murderer’s row of players. Al Horford and Norm Powell were only +$0.72 after everything shook out, while Tre Jones and Caris Levert were +$3.47 and +$3.92, respectively. Paul Reed somewhat justified his preseason valuaton by performing well in Embiid’s absence and finishing +$6.01. He could remain a good value big depending on his role with the Pistons. Aaron Nesmith finished +$6.90 and with an average salary of only $4.44 - I suspect managers want to see him repeat his shooting performance and fill out the rest of his game before handing arb to him. Finally we end up with the three biggest misses - Bogdan Bogdanovic, Kelly Olynyk, and Dennis Schröder - who were all over $10 in surplus. They’re all on the older side, were on lottery teams, and two of them - Olynyk and Schröder - were traded midseason while Bogdanovic has consistently been in rumors. They’re also all international players about to play in the Olympics, which is a funny coincidence.

Out of this group, only Reed, Jones, and Nesmith are young, with all of them entering their age 25 season. I don’t really think Ottobasket managers erred not giving them arb.

Arb and Contending

This exercise has gotten me thinking about contending in Ottoneu. Many of the best teams at the end of the season are those who aggressively trade prospects and high surplus younger players for high priced stars (and the accompanying loans). For example, it seems many are willing to go up to $500 in salary for $450 in value if it means making the playoffs. This seems to go hand in hand with the idea to assign arb to talent over impact, so it is better to arb stars and either force cuts there or try to reduce the surplus from players in the $10-$30 range? Of course, this is only applicable when there isn’t an obvious arb candidate, but I think I would lean towards hitting the lower salary player who is more likely to get dealt during the season in exchange for a star. The stars tend to bunch on a few teams and therefore some of them have to get cut anyway as the team salary limit resets to $400 at the keep / cut deadline, putting them back in the auction pool while lower salary players are more likely to skate through. But that’s just my current thought!

Finishing Thoughts

Overall it seems like managers do a solid job of assigning arbitration money to players and without insight into every league’s context, it’s tough to fault any individual decision. After all, the LaMelo that got hit with arb could be the $59 one that is the lowest in Ottobasket - I would almost certainly keep a $59 LaMelo Ball! There are some tweaks that I would personally do, but every manager is trying to accomplish the same goal with different team-building philosophies.

As always, the best arb strategy is to simply have all 12 managers complete it. I’m looking forward to doing this again next year and perhaps getting some more longitudinal insight into the data!