The last few months have felt like a celebrated court battle between basketball purists and the rise of analytics. From coaches claiming to have won games on paper, to superstars campaigning against the use of these tactics, to legends revealing that they were prohibited from taking their signature shots, analytics have caused a lot of drama in the forum of public opinion.
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One thing is for certain: analytics have changed the way we approach the game of basketball, and two specific people should have a serious bone to pick with this phenomenon.
The individuals in question are Bennedict Mathurin and Jonathan Kuminga. The former just agreed to a two-year, $16 million contract with the New Orleans Pelicans, while the latter signed for two years, $13 million to play for the Minnesota Timberwolves.
On the surface, these deals guarantee that Mathurin and Kuminga will be millionaires for a couple more years. Not a bad place to be on the tax bracket. But if you really think about it, analytics caused them both to miss out on a lot of money.
Mathurin and Kuminga are both under 25 years old, hyper athletic, built like swimsuit models, and have seasons averaging 16+ PPG under their belts. Once upon a time, these were the types of guys who passed the illustrious “eye test” and got the big paydays.
Don’t believe me? In the Summer of 2013, 27-year-old Josh Smith, a player with a similar profile to Mathurin and Kuminga, signed with the Detroit Pistons on a deal that paid him just under 24% of the salary cap (neither of those two is over 5%).
Alas, the way we evaluate players has changed. Yes, Mathurin and Kuminga can get you buckets in a hurry, but can they do it efficiently? They both shot respectable percentages from the floor (Mathurin 43% last season, Kuminga 46.3%). But science has taught us that true shooting is a better way to measure efficiency (since it accounts for threes and free throws), and according to that, Mathurin is just average, while Kuminga sits in the bottom third of the league.
What about their creation? Does their offensive gravitas enable them to open up enough shots for teammates to compensate for their pedestrian individual efficiency? Not really, as metrics like assist:usage rate (per Cleaning the Glass) and Passer Rating (CraftedNBA) also consider them below average in this regard.
Okay, so they aren’t fit to be high-usage ball handlers. Can they find ancillary ways to provide value through things like defense and floor spacing? Mathurin has graded out as a poor defender his entire career. On the flip side, Estimated Plus-Minus views Kuminga more favorably (60th percentile last season, per Dunks & Threes), but his on-off numbers (more on this in just a bit) aren’t as fond of his contributions on that end of the floor. As for shooting, neither one of them boasts a career 3-point percentage that crosses the 34% threshold.
No clear pathway to being someone you can build an offense around, and no easily identifiable traits that make you feel good about them amplifying one of those types of players. The “advanced” numbers don’t seem to be on Mathurin and Kuminga’s side, but even more damning, even the simplest of analytics view them as flawed players.
To me, plus-minus is the easiest new-age measure to wrap your head around. How many more/less points does your team score when you are on the floor? How much better/worse is your team with you on/off the floor? It’s simple. Do you help your team win? Or are you holding them back?
In his four NBA seasons to this point, only once has Mathurin’s team been better when he was on the floor than on the bench (2024-25). And even then, it was only by 0.9 points per 100 possessions. In three of Kuminga’s five seasons, his teams have been worse with him on the court.
Analytics are even used to calculate what a player’s market value is. Just a few weeks ago, I introduced my measure for estimating a player’s production value. Based on that formula, Mathurin should be making roughly $7.7 million and Kuminga $6.5 million (assuming they both play 65 games), which, what do you know, is right around what they will be making next season.
This isn’t to say that Mathurin and Kuminga are bad players who will never contribute to a championship team. We just saw Mathurin be a useful player on an Indiana Pacers team that was one win away from winning it all. I’m actually a big fan of the Pelicans and Timberwolves taking a low-risk flyer on both of these guys — in the hopes that their on-court production will catch up to their tantalizing physical tools.
Rather, this is to show that these types of flawed players, the kind who used to command massive paydays, are now valued as rotation-level players. This is the new reality that analytics have created, for better or worse.