Shooting Has Never Been So Valuable in the NBA
Joe Harris, Davis Bertans and Fred VanVleet were the big winners of free agency. It’s a bull market for the league’s best shooters.
The most demoralizing experiences for an NBA player include getting surgery, getting traded by a good team and getting waived by a bad team. Joe Harris experienced all three on the same day in 2016.
At that point of his basketball career, Harris didn’t know if he would play in the league again, and he certainly didn’t expect to get paid insane amounts of money. But he would be as wrong about himself as the rest of the NBA. The first contract that he signed with the Brooklyn Nets after that dreadful morning was a minimum deal worth $2.5 million over two seasons. Then he earned a substantial raise to stay with the Nets on another two-year deal worth $16 million. By the time that one expired and he became a free agent last week, the Nets had publicly declared that keeping him was their top priority.
That is how Joe Harris went from $2.5 million to $16 million to his latest, longest, unlikeliest contract: a four-year deal worth $75 million.
The remarkable thing about Harris’s four-year journey from doubting if he was good enough for the NBA to signing for $75 million is that it isn’t all that remarkable anymore.
What happened over the weekend in NBA free agency was a lesson in who gets valued and why—and it showed that the price of shooting has never been so high.
The Nets splurged for Harris. The Washington Wizards shelled out $80 million over five years for Davis Bertans. The Toronto Raptors paid $85 million over five years to Fred VanVleet.
Harris, Bertans and VanVleet are not star players. They are role players. The star players making the most amount of money permitted under the salary cap don’t negotiate so much as they sign a sheet of paper that makes them obscenely wealthy. But the role players are the ones who reveal deeper truths about the game and where it’s going.
“I hope all young hoopers at home are watching how the NBA is paying their players,” tweeted Jared Dudley, a free agent and the league’s resident sage.
The fiscal decisions of NBA teams made it clear that shooting is the single most valuable skill in the league today.
Among the free agents who managed to get paid in a depressed market were Danilo Gallinari ($61.5 million for three years), Harris and Bertans. This was not an example of the irrational exuberance that afflicts teams in free agency. It turned out to be prudent investing. There was a premium on those players because they do one thing as well as anybody on earth: shoot 3-pointers.
So do Seth Curry and Danny Green. Even though they were under contract, they were no less in demand. The first thing that Philadelphia 76ers president Daryl Morey did in his new job was trade for them.
The newest Sixers had something in common with Harris, Bertans and VanVleet besides their elite shooting. Each one of them was improperly valued by a market that would eventually correct itself.
Curry got overlooked despite sharing DNA with the greatest shooter ever. Green was cut twice and once played in Slovenia. Bertans was a second-round pick, and VanVleet went undrafted altogether. They would change as much as the league around them. But nobody would have predicted a $75 million deal in Harris’s future when he was traded and waived while still in the hospital recovering from surgery—especially not Harris.
He was unemployed and crashing in New York with a friend of a friend when he figured his odds of returning to the NBA were 50/50. There were others who might have thought Harris was being generous. The realist in him knew that not many second-round picks get second chances, but the optimist in him saw a future that others didn’t see. “I was thinking to myself that I might have another shot at it,” Harris said a few years ago, “just because of the emphasis that everyone is putting on shooting.”
The Nets were one of those teams. They signed him, developed him and re-signed him two years later as Harris quietly began positioning himself for the biggest payday of his life. His role took on even greater importance when Brooklyn landed Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving and spacing became essential. The difference between a 35% shooter, a 40% shooter and a 45% shooter like Harris is a few more inches for Durant and Irving to operate. Harris would learn that a few inches on an NBA court is worth a whole lot of money.
The final year of his new contract amounts to a raise of 2,000% from his first season with the Nets—the equivalent of someone going from a salary of $50,000 to more than $1 million.
Harris also may have set the market for someone else. Miami Heat guard Duncan Robinson, who went from dreaming about Division-III college basketball not long ago to catching fire in the NBA Finals, was the best volume shooter in the league last season on what might be the best deal in the league this season.
The most improbable thing about the NBA’s most improbable player is that his $1.6 million salary is now a bargain. A league that values Davis Bertans and Joe Harris at $155 million is going to make any player with an even higher 3-point shooting percentage a very rich man. As it turns out, there is only one: Duncan Robinson is a free agent next summer.