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Age Impact: When is an Athlete’s Prime Relative to Financial Value?
Nick Crain | 12/14/22
When analyzing historical data, and searching for peak statistical performance, most players in the NBA typically hit their peak around age 26. With that in mind, the modern NBA is flooded with young talent as some of the best players in the entire league are in their early twenties. With the aforementioned in mind, we wanted to use the real-time performance value models in the Athledex database to get a sense of when some of the top players around the league are worth the most from a financial standpoint. In general, younger players are less injury prone and could actually be a better return on investment than some of the stars that are getting closer to 30 and beyond. We took a look at ten of the top players in the league between the ages of 23 and 30 as it relates to Player Efficiency Rating (PER), which is a per-minute rating that sums up all a player’s positive accomplishments, subtracts the negative accomplishments, and returns a per-minute rating of a player’s performance. We then put these ten players into two different groups based on age for the analysis. Age Group: 23-26 Ja Morant (23)
Luka Doncic (23)
Jaren Jackson Jr. (23)
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (24)
Jayson Tatum (24)
Age Group: 27-30
Nikola Jokic (27)
Giannis Antetokounmpo (28)
Joel Embiid (28)
Paskal Siakam (28)
Anthony Davis (29)
What we found was that four of the five players in the younger age group are outperforming their current contract. On the flip side, only three of the five athletes in the older group met that criteria. Furthermore, the younger age group had a higher positive return on investment than the older group on average. This is where age impact comes into play, which is another key input of the ProFitX real-time contract values. The older players get, the higher the chance of injury and rest throughout the season. While this isn’t always the case, this could suggest that quite a few of the top rising stars in the league are able to outperform rookie max deals, but even the best players on the planet could struggle to truly play up to the supermax levels of pay. This becomes even more of a reality when players begin to play beyond their early thirties.