A wholistic view of league spending shows several trends. One such trend is the persistence of star players on every team. Certain players emerge as targets for teams to blow an absolute bag to retain. The Golden State Warriors spent the most in the league on their way to win the 2022 Championship while boasting the third highest win percentage in the league.
Now if we dive into individual player salaries, we can see a trend amongst the lower win percetange teams. The teams below .500 typically only have a single player getting paid above $30m, except the Lakers, but that's another story. These teams don't have the salary cap to get better players, therefore they can't win games, this isn't breaking news. Surprisingly, the Lakers have 3 players making $45m+ and still failed to get above .500 or make the playoffs.
Most of the issues with team's success can be broken down into how each team spends their total money. Star players have a big impact but also can't carry a team of bums to the playoffs. Portland for example spends about 30% of their salary cap on Damian Lillard, who has a great impact on the game, but can be stopped by a bad shooting night or good defense. Here you can explore a breakdown of each team's salary distribution.
Method
All data is from basketball reference and HoopsHype. I used Flourish to make the data visualisations.
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