About BagCheck

Every contract is scored against the league-wide salary curve and lands on a 1–100 scale. That number is the headline. The verdict underneath (Steal, Bargain, Fair, Overpay, or Albatross) is the plain-language read of where it falls. High numbers mean the front office is robbing the market. Low numbers mean the market is returning the favor.

A low number doesn't always mean a bad contract, so the downside verdict gets swapped in three cases. Rookie-scale and veteran-minimum deals read Rookie scale or Vet min, because the CBA set that price, not a negotiation. A player who appeared in under 60% of his team's games reads Limited games, since missed time drags the score down whatever the reason. Two-way contracts aren't rated at all. The number itself never changes.

Where it breaks: Heist scores rookie-scale and vet-minimum contracts against the same curve as open-market deals, even though they're structurally different beasts. Only the downside word changes for them; their numbers still rank with everyone else's, so the leaderboard skews young, which is worth keeping in mind.

The idea here is to catch contracts that are priced off past performance rather than current. Three factors combine multiplicatively: decline (how far a player's Win Shares per game have fallen from their peak rate), overpay (how much their salary exceeds the WS-implied value), and a salary weight that keeps the metric focused on contracts big enough to matter. Miss any one of the three and the score collapses toward zero. Decline is measured per game on purpose: a star who misses half the season but plays like himself when available isn't fading, he's hurt. The games he misses still cost real money, and that shows up in overpay instead. It only applies to a contract that's under water: if the Dividend is positive, the player is still beating the salary curve, and there's no past glory being paid for.

Where it breaks: the peak-WS baseline only looks back as far as the data we have. Players whose true peak predates our window end up with an artificially low peak, which understates their real Legacy Tax.

Every other metric on the page is retrospective. Bag Alert looks the other direction: it projects the rest of a contract using position-aware aging curves and a recency-weighted read of the player's history, then adds up, year by year, how far the production he's projected to deliver falls short of what his salary buys on the open market. Each year is priced exactly like the Dividend, so this season's figure is his Dividend shortfall, and no year can count for more than it pays. Future salaries are scaled down for expected cap growth: $40M four years out is a smaller slice of that year's market than $40M today. The result is a dollar figure in today's money. Because it's priced against the market rather than a flat cost-per-win, a star paid his going rate reads near zero; only deals that outrun their production pile up dollars.

The projection works in per-game production rather than season totals, so an injury-shortened year dents a player's outlook instead of cratering it; expected games come from the player's typical availability over the last four seasons, and the first year after a mostly missed season is projected as a ramp-back. Players with three or fewer seasons are blended with the historical expectation for their draft slot, worth about one season of evidence. One bad rookie year dents a top-five pick's projection; it does not erase it.

Where it breaks: the aging curves are league averages. They can't tell you that LeBron is LeBron, or that a particular guard has a game built on something other than athleticism and will age fine. On specific players, your eye will usually beat this metric; across the full league, the reverse tends to be true.

The other three metrics audit one contract. The Receipt closes the books on the whole career: every season's Dividend, summed, next to every dollar the league has paid him. It speaks from the league's ledger rather than any one team's, because careers move and the checks come from whoever is writing them. A positive Receipt means the production has outrun the pay, across every uniform. During the season, the current year counts only the share of the schedule played so far, so a hot first week can't swing a whole career.

Where it breaks: it inherits every season's Dividend noise. The dollars also come from different eras, and the cap has nearly tripled across the seasons we track, so we convert before we add: each season's surplus is scaled by the ratio of the viewed season's cap to that season's cap. A rookie-scale bargain from a $58M-cap league therefore counts for what it would be worth today, instead of being rounded away by a league that now pays triple for the same win. That corrects the league's inflation, not the judgment: every season is still scored against its own market, so the total remains a sum of era-relative verdicts. And our data starts in 2003-04: careers that predate the window carry a “since 2003-04” tag wherever the number appears, because a Receipt that opens mid-career is an honest partial, not a career total.

Heist Rating's verdict, in dollars. How far a player's production lands above or below what the salary should buy, priced at the going rate for a Win Share. It bottoms out at the player's salary: a contract can't lose more than it paid. You'll see it riding along wherever Heist Rating appears. Summed over a career, it becomes The Receipt.

Where it breaks: false precision. The difference between +$8.2M and +$7.1M lives well inside the noise of Win Shares itself, so you should really be reading The Dividend in rough buckets (positive, mildly negative, badly negative) rather than to the decimal.

This is the blunt version of the value question. A $40M player producing 5 WS costs $8M per win, full stop. It doesn't care about context, age, role, or trajectory, which makes it useful when you just want a quick cross- contract comparison without thinking too hard. Mid-season, Win Shares are projected to a full-season pace first, so a ten-game Price Tag reads on the same scale as a finished season's.

Where it breaks: the 0.1 WS floor keeps the math alive at the low end, so a replacement-level player on $5M reads as “$50M per win,” which is technically true and practically meaningless. Price Tag works fine as a secondary display, but it's not load-bearing as a primary analytical tool.

Where Heist runs a regression, The Spread runs a much simpler comparison. Line the league up by pay, then by output, and look at who climbs the furthest up the second list. That surfaces the players who sit low on the salary ladder and high on the production one.

Where it breaks: the same CBA distortion that messes with Heist shows up here too. Rookies and vet-minimums dominate by construction, which is why this metric earns its keep in the middle of the salary distribution, where contracts actually get negotiated.