Disclaimer, for anyone who actually wants the wrong answer to a stupid question:
The following 'blog' is adapted from an essay I wrote for a writing class in the Spring of 2020. I posted it on a site that I created for a separate writing class in the Summer of 2020. I will not be submitting this as an assignment for WRIT197.
On April 20, 2020, ESPN aired the first two episodes of “The Last Dance,” a documentary series that followed the Chicago Bulls during the 1997-98 NBA season. An ESPN camera crew was given exclusive access to the Bulls players, coaches, and front office staff in their natural habitat, and the show they put together is nothing short of awesome. For someone like me that was born into a post-Bulls world, it is truly astounding to learn about such a dominant team. After watching a seemingly endless highlight reel of Michael Jordan, though, I got the sense that this docuseries was going to be all about him. That would have been no problem, but episode two shared the story of the Scottie Pippen – Robin to MJ’s Batman.
The second episode opened in the summer of 1991, weeks after the Bulls won their first of 6 NBA championships. According to BasketballReference, Pip averaged more rebounds, steals, blocks, and assists per game than MJ did in that regular season, which proved his value as a world champion. Pippen had decided to opt out of the final years of his entry-level deal and use his incredible stats as leverage to earn a higher salary. I expected that he would have been paid at a level that was commensurate to the body of work he represented, but that was not to be. Scottie Pippen signed a 7-year, $18 million deal (via Sportrac), which is far less than what he was worth. That averaged out to $2.6 million a year - which is more than a healthy living - but Jordan and head coach Phil Jackson agreed with the notion that Pip was worth more than what he was paid. I believe that Phil and Mike are right, seeing as they have far better knowledge of basketball and of Scottie’s talent, but I think we can dig a little deeper. How can we accurately measure Scottie Pippen’s real value? Well, by comparing Pippen’s on-court productivity with Michael Jordan’s and using the net present value of Jordan’s various contracts with the Bulls to build a Scottie Pippen costing model, I determined that Scottie Pippen was indeed underpaid – by about $3 million a year.
I understand that general managers consider probably dozens of non-basketball factors when negotiating a player’s contract, but the business side of sports is pretty much impossible (for someone outside of an NBA front office) to properly account for. Therefore, I have elected to ignore it altogether. For as important as things like salary cap and proposed trade deals may have been, none of them are relevant to Scottie’s performance on the court. I also can’t assign an accurate weight or relative importance to any non-basketball factor of a player’s value to an organization, that would require firsthand knowledge of the process. I will use only statistical comparisons of these two players to calculate their value relative to one another and use that to derive an appropriate salary for Pippen. This will give us a sense for the true value of a player based solely on his performance.
THE METHOD(s)
For the sake of this argument, ‘value’ refers to the impact of a player’s actions on the basketball court, represented by statistics. These metrics illustrate a player’s production on the court, and therefore what that player is worth to their team. I established two different methods of measuring player performance: the ‘Freeze Frame’ and the ‘Crystal Ball’. For the ‘Freeze Frame’ method, I compared the 1990-1991 seasons of both Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen using 5 basic ‘counting’ statistics that are common in basic basketball analysis: points per game, assists per game, rebounds per game, steals per game, and blocks per game. These show Pip’s production during the most recent regular season at the time of his contract negotiations; thus, they represent the most simple and relevant evaluation possible. I derived the percent difference in each of those five categories to find Scottie’s productivity in that statistical field relative to Jordan. For example, MJ scored 1.77 points for every 1 that Pippen did. I took the average of those percent differences and divided it by 1, thereby creating the Conventional Michael Jordan Index (CMJI).
(Yes, the Michael Jordan Index. I'm pretty proud of that.)
CMJI is the average percent difference across all five basic stats between the two players, and the resulting number represents the value of Scottie's productivity, relative to Mike's. Given each player’s stats as recorded by BasketballReference, Scottie Pippen’s 1991 Conventional MJI value was 0.91. That means that Scottie Pippen was worth about 0.91 Jordans. Put another way: based on the 5 basic stats, Michael Jordan produced 110% what Scottie Pippen did.
This approach shows a relevant line of thinking for comparing Jordan to Pippen at that moment in time, but the ‘Freeze Frame’ can’t show us Pippen’s career as a whole. Looking into the future from 1991 through my “Crystal Ball” yields vastly different results.
The measure I chose to be my “Crystal Ball” is called RAPTOR. This formula is the most recent iteration of an experiment launched by Nate Silver, founder/Editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight. He developed RAPTOR as a “statistic that better reflects how NBA teams actually evaluate players." Simply put, a player’s RAPTOR shows how many points they contribute to his team’s offense and defense per 100 possessions, represented by a positive or negative score. The entire breakdown is here, if you feel so inclined to read more. I compared Jordan and Pippen in both offensive and defensive RAPTOR by calculating the percent difference in each and used those percent differences to calculate Pip’s RAPTOR MJI, which came out to 0.60.
This means that Michael Jordan contributed 1.66 points per 100 possessions for every 1 that Pippen did. Thus, Scottie Pippen was worth 0.6 Michael Jordans over the span of their respective careers. Now that we have Pippen’s relative statistical value two ways, we can calculate how much Scottie Pippen was worth.
As I mentioned earlier, many non-basketball factors go into how much any player gets paid – like front office strategy, salary cap limitations, merchandise sales, age, and maybe even gambling habits. The weights of each of these factors are virtually impossible to calculate meaningfully, so I decided to take this stance: Michael Jordan was worth exactly what he was paid because he is the best player of all time, and therefore it was impossible to overpay him. RAPTOR proves that he is the greatest of all time, as he has a total career score of +8.6 (lower only than Chris Paul, oddly enough), as well as ownership of the 7 of the 10 best RAPTOR seasons of all time. His 1991 campaign is at the top of the list, scoring a combined RAPTOR of +12.3. Aside from the numerical proof, testimonies of players like Larry Bird, Wilt Chamberlain, and Magic Johnson are more than enough to convince me. Don't trust me? Hold this.
Because MJ’s salary now occupies both the upper limit and the ideal performance to pay ratio, all there is left to do is solve for Pippen’s salary and adjust for inflation. Pip’s relative on-court value was calculated using two different MJI measures, so there are two different salary options as a result.
To account for inflation, I found the NPV (net present value) of both players’ salaries between 1991 and 1997 given an average inflation rate of 3.124% (Duffin). Based on their salaries according to Sportrac, the average net present value of Jordan’s salary with the Bulls is $10.11 million, and Pippen’s is $2.54 million. Taking Jordan’s average NPV to be perfectly accurate in terms of on-court value, I calculated two different 7-year salaries that Scottie Pippen would have been justified in signing. At last, it's about to get interesting.
THE MADNESS
Given that Scottie Pippen should have been paid a salary commensurate to his value relative to Michael Jordan, and that Michael Jordan was worth exactly what he was paid, Scottie Pippen was worth a 7-year, $64.19 million deal as of the end of the 1991 regular season. The average annual value of that deal is $9.17 million, about 3 times what he actually signed for. If we were to use Scottie’s career value, he would be justified in signing a 7-year deal worth $42.54 million, or $6.08 million a year.
Now, both of these contracts are worth more than the one that Jordan himself was on in 1991, which one might imagine is completely illogical. They’d be right, except for the fact that Jordan signed $30+ million-dollar deals for each of his last 2 seasons with the Bulls. Average NPV accounts for this by producing what is essentially the average annual value (AAV) of each contracted year, adjusted for inflation. At long last, we can compare Batman to Robin – dollar for dollar. But what does this mean, on a personal level? Could anyone really be worth that much money? Should they?
The idea that a professional athlete of Scottie Pippen’s caliber could be ‘underpaid’ makes me squirm. $2.8 million a year for 7 years is a lot of money. In the grand scheme of things, though, sports are entertainment, and the entertainment industry generates wealth like few others do. People still pay to watch basketball, just like people still pay to go to the movies. The corporations responsible for creating this entertainment reap the benefits and pay the entertainers what they think is reasonable, or at least what they can justify as such. This raises deeper philosophical questions, like: What is the moral value of entertainment? Is our ceaseless desire to be occupied worth creating such gluttony and inequity? Is there an inequity at all, really? After all, we are the ones paying for it. Well, the fact is that there was money to be made in 1991. Scottie Pippen had just played a central role in heralding the arrival of the Chicago Bulls as a true dynasty. He and Michael Jordan would shock the world for another 6 years, lighting scoreboards and record books ablaze in the process. It’s reasonable to assume that Jordan deserved what he was paid because of his truly singular talent. In other words, he dominated the game like nobody else ever will. Right alongside him was Scottie Pippen, who did his fair share of entertaining. If we were to compare the two in terms of the show they put on and the money they earned doing it, I think Scottie was worth more than what he was paid. And now, I can prove it.
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