One way we can tackle the "hot commodity" question is to look at the free-agency market. Remember when everyone freaked out about the\u00a0Jodie Meeks<\/a>\u00a0contract on the opening day of free agency? The shooting-starved Pistons threw $19 million over three years to\u00a0Kobe Bryant<\/a>'s backup-turned-starter last season. Why? Because he can shoot the heck out of the ball. Meeks was a career-high 40.1 percent from downtown last season while averaging 15.7 points per game as a 2-guard, a position that is shallower than a puddle. So he got his money.<\/p>\n But Meeks is only one tiny speck among nearly 100 players who have signed this offseason. If shooting — particularly the 3-point variety — has become all the rage, wouldn't we be able to see it in the contract data?<\/p>\n This is where it gets interesting. My feeling heading into this study was that we'd see an enormous shooting effect on the free-agency market. If you can shoot 3s, you're due for a big payday. From the other side of the table, teams were paying a premium just to get in on the 3-point action. Or so I thought.<\/p>\n And then I looked closer at the data. Take\u00a0Kyle Lowry<\/a>, for instance. The point guard led all free agents with 190 3-pointers last season and netted "just" $12 million annually for four years. That's an absolute steal for the\u00a0Toronto Raptors<\/a>, considering he was the East's best point guard last season, putting up 11.6 WAR in his prime.<\/p>\n Looking at the going rate in the free-agency market, it seems Lowry's pockets should be fatter. Teams paid on average $1.8 million per WAR this offseason, which means Lowry deserved something in the neighborhood of $20 million annually if he got paid like the rest of his colleagues did.<\/p>\n If there was a shooting bonus on the market, Lowry didn't see any of it. Put another way, Lowry made more than twice as many 3s as\u00a0Gordon Hayward<\/a>\u00a0last season — guess who got the max? True, Hayward is 24, four years younger than Lowry, but Hayward's contract blewLance Stephenson<\/a>'s deal out of the water, even though Stephenson is younger (23), registered better overall numbers and shot 3s better than Hayward.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n There are more instances of big free-agent money going to non-shooters as opposed to elite shooters.\u00a0Jordan Hill<\/a>, who is listed at 26 but may secretly have the body of a 46-year-old, got more annual money than one of the stretchiest bigs in the league,\u00a0Channing Frye<\/a>.\u00a0Luol Deng<\/a>, with a 30.2 percent shooting percentage last season, will be receiving a bigger paycheck than\u00a0Trevor Ariza<\/a>, who shot 41 percent from deep. Again, non-shooters don't seem to be missing out on all of the free-agency fun.<\/p>\n To be sure, plenty of 3-point marksmen got paid. Bosh, a 3-point shooter, netted a max contract despite having\u00a0somewhat pedestrian numbers<\/a>. But it's interesting to note that of the five biggest bargains of the offseason according to WAR-to-dollar conversions, four were elite 3-point shooters:\u00a0Dirk Nowitzki<\/a>,\u00a0Vince Carter<\/a>, Frye and Lowry (Dallas'\u00a0Al-Farouq Aminu<\/a>\u00a0was the other). Even if we take an extra step and adjust for age, that quartet still took well-below-market deals. Nowitzki's case is an extreme one; it's pretty much unprecedented for a player of his caliber to sign for $8.3 million annually after putting up All-NBA numbers.<\/p>\n On the whole, good shooters tend to get paid more money. Duh. As you might suspect, there is a small link between free-agency money this offseason and how many 3-pointers they made in 2013-14. But its effect is more muted than you might think.<\/p>\n The math gets a little more serious from here on out, so if numbers make you queasy, you might want to sit the next couple of plays out. For the statisticians out there, the correlation coefficient between the two key variables (annual contract dollars and 3-pointers made) stood at .22 where zero is completely random and plus-1 is a perfectly positive relationship (one variable goes up, so does the other) and minus-1 is a negative relationship (one goes up, other goes down). That relationship was much cloudier in both the 2013 offseason (correlation coefficient of 0.081) and 2012 offseason (0.095), indicating that the market might be tilting somewhat toward shooters.<\/p>\n But the link between contracts and shooting isn't nearly as strong now as it was in 2009, aka the year of\u00a0Ben Gordon<\/a>'s big\u00a0contract<\/a>. That 2009 offseason saw a .414 correlation coefficient between shooting and contract dollars. The three top contracts that summer went to Gordon,\u00a0Hedo Turkoglu<\/a>\u00a0and Jason Kidd, all elite shooters from beyond the arc.<\/p>\n For a more rigorous analysis to determine whether there is a clear shooting effect on the market, I ran a regression that predicted free-agency dollars after controlling for various factors including age, height, minutes played, points per game, 3-point makes, WAR and whether they made the All-Star game the previous season (an\u00a0considerable effect<\/a>\u00a0found by ESPN Insider Kevin Pelton). To my surprise, 3-point shooting was not statistically significant this offseason in predicting contract dollars. However, in the past six seasons, 3-point shooting did appear to have an effect over a larger sample of more than 500 player contracts. (Hat-tip to Pelton for the historical contract data.)<\/p>\n These statistical findings run counter to what an NBA veteran recently\u00a0conveyed<\/a>\u00a0to ESPN's Kevin Arnovitz in Las Vegas. "You have to be able to shoot the ball" the NBA veteran said to Arnovitz. "Especially big men. You look at\u00a0Spencer Hawes<\/a>. Look at Channing Frye. That's good money. You can have a job for a long time if you can shoot."<\/p>\n What the player did not mention was that Hill,\u00a0Pau Gasol<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Marcin Gortat<\/a>\u00a0all got paid handsomely for their inside games.<\/p>\n![\"Jordan](\"http:\/\/a.espncdn.com\/photo\/2014\/0114\/la_g_jhillts_288x162.jpg\")
<\/p>\n