Which Teams Overpaid The Most In Free Agency?

As much as we love to ordain players as hoopers or marvel at how “tuff” their game is, basketball is – and always has been – a game of numbers. Scoring efficiently matters. Valuing possessions matters. And in the offseason, spending money wisely matters.

The best teams always get the most value for their dollar, and the worst ones tend to overspend on subpar production. Last season, the two best contracts belonged to the current defending-champions (Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jalen Williams).

So, it is important to take stock of how well money is being spent across the league. That is way, in this two part mini-series, we are going to look at the best and worst contracts signed in free agency to this point (Monday, July 7). For this edition of the mini-series, we will be looking at the more curious finanical decisions of this offseason.

Method For Assessing Player Value

As a reminder, we are going to focus on a method inspired by Seth Partnow’s book, “The Midrange Theory.”

In his book, the former Director of Basketball Research for the Milwaukee Bucks discusses a formula that teams use to estimate a player’s monetary value. In its essence, the formula involves multiplying how many points a player is “worth” by the amount a win “costs” in a given season. Unfortunately, Real-Adjusted Plus-Minus (RAPM) — a major component in the formula — is no longer available. So, I’ve revised Partnow’s formula a bit.

The Website Dunks & Threes offers a metric called Estimated Wins (EW). As the name implies, this measure quite literally estimates how many wins a player earned for their team in a given season. Theoretically, by multiplying this number by the amount a win is worth in a given season (3.8 in 2025-26), we can get an idea of how much they should be making next season. From there, we can compare the average annual value of the contract they received to the amount this exercise produced to see the disparity in how much they got paid versus what they are actually worth.

Now, there are some shortcomings to using such a simple method for calculating a player’s value. First, we are limited to the methodology used to compute EW. As is the case with any catch-all metric, EW can only tell you how many wins a player added in their specific role on their specific team.

And second, this sort of method biases against players who struggle with injuries — since they aren’t on the court to help have an impact on winning. In some instances, like with players who are consistently injured, this can be helpful. But in one-off cases, where a player is uncharacteristically unhealthy for a year, this can make a player look far less valuable than they actually are (we’ll talk more about these specific examples in Part Two).

Now, with all table all set, let’s take a look at the worst contracts of the 2025 offseason up to this point.

(Sidebar: We are only focusing on contracts signed by restricted/unrestricted free agents, not extensions signed by players with time still left on their current contract.)

The Best Contracts Of The 2025 Offseason

To me, the most alarming part of this list is that 60% of it is occupied by Minnesota Timberwolves/Milwaukee Bucks signings. To the Bucks’ credit, they also had a lot of positive value signings (Gary Trent Jr., Taurean Prince, Ryan Rollins, and Kevin Porter Jr.). But for the Timberwolves, all three of their signings to this point have landed on this infamous list. When you couple that with the departure of Nickeil Alexander-Walker, the increase in threatening teams in the Western Conference, and their coming up short in the Kevin Durant sweepstakes, this has been a rough start to the offseason for the Timberwolves.

For those of you who followed our under-the-radar free agents series, you may be wondering why Duncan Robinson’s name appears on this list. In that article, we said Robinson would be a steal near the veteran minimum