Nba Salary and Contract

Claremont Colleges

Scholarship @ Claremont

CMC Senior Theses CMC Student Scholarship

2013

An Analysis of the Contract Year Phenomenon in the NBA: Do Players Perform Better or Worse

Tyler Gaffaney

Claremont McKenna College

Recommended Citation

Gaffaney, Tyler, "An Analysis of the Contract Year Phenomenon in the NBA: Do Players Perform Better or Worse" (2013). CMC Senior Theses. Paper 768. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/768

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CLAREMONT McKENNA COLLEGE

An Analysis of the Contract Year Phenomenon in the NBA: Do Players Perform Better or Worse?

SUBMITTED TO Professor Ricardo Fernholz AND Dean Nicholas Warner BY Tyler Gaffaney

for SENIOR THESIS Fall 2013 December 2, 2013

Acknowledgements First, I would like to thank anyone who contributed to this thesis in any way. I would also like to thank my family, especially my parents for their support over the years. Specifically, I would like to thank my reader Professor Ricardo Fernholz for his keen insight and continued advice. Without his help, this thesis would not have been possible.

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Abstract The present study uses a novel measure of over performance (percent deviation from career average) to analyze the contract year phenomenon in the NBA. Historically, the literature has pointed toward over performance across almost all statistical measures of performance. However, previous research has assumed that all players are universally affected by the presence of a contract year in the same manner. The present study finds significant results that contradict previous research by dividing the sample of players into subgroups by age, career PER and position. Furthermore, the results of this paper’s statistical analysis illustrate the first examples of...