Pretty much the only way Ian Mahinmi will ever EVER be worth his contract is if he averages this many points per game until he’s 34 years old, which is when his contract finally ends. However, he will need to average more than the three rebounds he grabbed in this game, unless he’s having the “Ekpe Udoh Effect” where team rebounding goes up while he’s on the court even though he’s not a fantastic rebounder himself.
Unfortunately for Wizards fans (or fans of whatever team the Wizards manage to unload Mahinmi onto), sixteen points in twenty minutes on 8-of-11 shooting is just not sustainable production for Mahinmi. The defense he can bring night in and night out, but the scoring he can only bring one out of every five games, and when you talk about “scoring” in the context of Ian Mahinmi, you’re talking ten points on six shots. Is that worth fifteen million dollars? Probably not.
For some reason I’ve been obsessed with bad contracts lately and I think I know why: it’s because I’m jealous of all that money. The fame I could give or take, but all that money would buy a LOT of solid-state hard drives for my video clips. Heck, I could build a server farm in my closet (sorry Wayne Ellington shrine you’re moving to the bathroom) with that money and render videos in two seconds flat. That’s honestly why I’m mad about all these too-big contracts.