Every rostered player's Projected NERD converts to
WAR the same way the NERD leaderboard does. Published NERD is
possession-weighted to a league average of zero, replacement is −2.0, and
PAR = (NERD + 2) × possessions / 100. PAR is converted into the
league's fixed pool of wins above a five-replacement-player team (about 16 wins).
On this page that pool is allocated across the rated players on current active rosters,
so inactive and unsigned forecast rows do not absorb wins from the salary market.
The default workload is 36 minutes per game for 82 games, which makes this
primarily a comparison of player quality rather than recent health. The workload selector
can instead use the current 2026-27 depth-chart MPG projection (also over 82 games), or each
player's actual total 2025-26 regular-season minutes. Only that final option carries games
missed into WAR and market value. Minutes convert to possessions using each player's
observed 2025-26 possessions per minute, with the roster average as a fallback.
The league's implied price per marginal win is a cap-share pivot, netted against replacement cost: total 2026-27 cap commitments across every rated, rostered player, minus $2.7M per player for the real salary a replacement-level roster spot still costs (the empirical average of this dataset's actual minimum contracts) — that floor buys zero marginal wins by definition, so leaving it in would overstate the price of a win with dollars that never bought one. The remainder is divided by the total WAR those same players are projected to produce. A player's market value is his WAR at that marginal rate, plus the same $2.7M baseline added back (so it's fairly comparable to his full cap hit) — what his production would cost at the league's own going rate — compared to his actual cap hit. Surplus = market value − cap hit: positive means he's outproducing his contract, negative means the opposite.
Rookie-scale players (tagged RK) will show large positive surplus almost by construction — their pay is fixed by the CBA's rookie scale, not by performance, so any productive rookie looks like a bargain. That's the expected, informative result of this kind of analysis, not a bug. This is a single-season, current-cap-year snapshot: it only uses each player's 2026-27 cap hit (no years remaining, guarantees, or option structure yet — that's a planned follow-up), and the league-average price-per-win is a simple cap-share (net of the replacement floor), not a market regression, so it doesn't separately account for the going rate a max-level free agent commands versus a minimum-salary veteran — max-contract rules cap what stars can earn well below their production, so their surplus will look enormous by this measure, similar to (but structurally different from) the rookie-scale effect. Players with no NBA history before 2026-27 (this year's rookie class) aren't rated yet and are left out of the table entirely, same as Projected NERD. Only signed active roster contracts are counted — cap holds, dead money, and speculative pending transactions are excluded.
| # | Player | Team | Contract | Cap Hit | Minutes | Poss | NERD | WAR | Market Value | Surplus |
|---|
Sort by clicking a column header.