Bird in the Hand

You don't have to look hard at the numbers to see Kevin Durant had a monster January; 36-6-6 tends to speak for itself and don't get me started about the percentages. Durant was so good that his greatness called into question the necessity of his sidekick, Russell Westbrook. This is not new. There will always be a pocket of people who believe the best thing for the Thunder would be to deal Westbrook. Durant being amazing without him only provides a large stage for those people to shout on.

On the surface this seems like a ridiculous proposition. We all saw how the Thunder operated without Westbrook in last years playoffs. Even with a greatly improved Reggie Jackson its easy to imagine the same outcome for the Thunder sans Westbrook. There is an interesting aspect to the "trade Westbrook" narrative however. Could the Thunder possibly get more value out of the salary they are paying Westbrook? My initial reaction would be to shout from the highest mountain a resounding no. But every interesting narrative deserves to be looked at in depth right?

Luckily for me, there is a nice metric in WARP that measures the Wins Above a Replacement Player. If you don't completely understand it I completely understand and would direct you here for an in-depth look at this stat. Combine this with player salary and you can find how much teams should be paying players per WARP and that's exactly what the good people at Hooponomics did back in 2012. Using their method and HoopsHype's salary data for the 13-14 season, I found that teams should be paying about 1.76 million dollars per WARP. Multiply that by Westbrook's projected WARP and you would see that he should be making about 20 million per year. That would be about 6 million more than he is getting paid right now.

I understand that this isn't a perfect way to look at the value of Westbrook but I think the point remains. The value Westbrook produces would be hard to reattain in a trade. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush right? Personally, I think that with KD being KD the flaws in Westbrook's game are magnified. It seems almost sacrilegious for a point to waste even one possession when they're sharing the same court as a Hall of Fame scorer. But I think it's important to realize that these two are probably still learning to play together as both of their games grow. Sure, there will be the occasional bad jumper early in the shot clock from Westbrook, but for every bad play I'm willing to bet he will have three more plays that will make up for it. He may even involve KD in one or two of those plays.