At any given point in the NBA, there are a select few players who are held up as examples of what happens when the guaranteed contract system goes horribly wrong. Rashard Lewis was one of those players, once upon a time. Gilbert Arenas has been in this category. More recently, the cap spike that enabled Kevin Durant to go the Warriors also enabled guys like Ian Mahinmi and Miles Plumlee to get crazy paydays. And, in the nowadays NBA, there is one player who always comes up when you start talking about bad contracts: the Fraudulent Frenchman himself, Nicolas Batum.
Batum got paid 25 million dollars by the Hornets this season to do basically nothing. When he would get into games, he wouldn’t really try to score or otherwise get involved. His utter disinterest in accumulating box-score stats would make Tony Snell look like a stat-stuffing machine. In 505 minutes, Batum made just 28 shots! That’s the eighth-lowest field goal total for any player in NBA history who got over 500 minutes (shout out to Dennis Rodman, Johnny High (?), Joel Przybilla, Charles Oakley, Joel Przybilla again, Dennis Awtrey, and Mark Madsen). He basically got paid a million dollars per bucket. Eventually, James Borrego stopped putting him into games, and Batum became a very, very expensive towel-waver, because how could you justify giving minutes to somebody who is content to just exist on the court and not do anything?
To be fair, Batum wasn’t the most useless player to get paid NBA money this season. After all, there were a number of guys who got NBA checks despite playing in no games and not even being on a roster. For example, Josh Smith, Timofey Mozgov, Luol Deng, and Deron Williams each got around $5,000,000 this season thanks to some arcane contractual concept called a “stretch provision”. Larry Sanders is getting around 1.9 mil for the two seasons AFTER this one thanks to the same provision. Miles Plumlee padded out his bank account with 12.5 million dollars after the Grizzlies waived him. Did you know that, three years from now, Kyle Singler will get a million bucks from the Thunder?
There are probably many more examples, but you can see from the players I listed that there are plenty of bad contracts in the NBA, and the players attached to those contracts are often considerably less NBA-worthy than Batum is. That said, Batum represents probably the worst ratio of production to contract size in the entire league. The other guys in the conversation all have the “injury” excuse to fall back on. John Wall and Chandler Parsons wouldn’t be considered cap-killers if they had stayed healthy. Batum is the dreaded cap-killer who is perfectly healthy. And he’s a cap-killer who has a player option so he can kill even MORE cap next season.
Despite the fact that Batum is not worthy of the amount of money he is being paid, we should all strive to avoid using terminology like “stealing” and “robbery”. Batum is not “stealing” money from Michael Jordan/the Hornets organization because you can’t steal something that is rightfully being given to you. The Hornets gave him that contract, everybody signed off on it, and now that money is Batum’s unless they agree to amend the contract. Remember when Lakers fans got all butthurt that Steve Nash decided to get paid his whole contract rather than take a paycut that would have given the Lakers some cap relief? I don’t sense that same butthurt from Hornets fans since they aren’t competing for anything, but those are the kinds of reactions you can expect from NBA fans who seem to want to put the blame for bloated contracts on the players themselves rather than the incompetent front offices who happily hand them out.
Anyway, you might not even care about that contract stuff. You’re just here to watch Batum get buckets, right? Well, you’re in for a treat because Batum gets HELLA buckets in this video. 28 is a high enough number to qualify for “HELLA” status, isn’t it? You could watch this bucketilation and come away from it wondering why Batum wasn’t more successful this season. And then you could re-watch every Hornets game that he appeared in, have your mind boggled by the utter statistical nothingness that he produces, and know exactly why Batum wasn’t more successful this season.