Why hasn’t anyone signed Kris Humphries?

The numbers in the post are using the new Wins Produced. You can find all of the Wins Produced numbers back to 2000 here!

With forwards like Carl Landry, Glen Davis, David West and Jeff Green getting big contracts a big question is why hasn’t anyone signed Kris Humphries?

2010-2011 Performance Comparison
Player	Age	New Salary/Yr	MP	WP48	WP
Kris Humphries	26	??	2061	0.254	10.92
David West	31	$10 million	2451	0.116	5.92
Carl Landry	28	$9 million	1996	0.043	1.79
Jeff Green	25	$9 million	2427	0.019	0.97
Glen Davis	26	$6.5 million	2298	-0.012	-0.60

If we compare Humphries to some of the other free agents bigs that have been snatched up we see that Humphries wasn’t just more productive than these players. He was more producitve than all of them put together! David West was the only other above average forward in the bunch, and even West was only barely above average. Unlike West, though, Humphries is much younger and more productive. When it comes to Landry, Green and Davis though the only explanation I have is that owners weren’t watching last season. Of course, that might explain the lockout.

Was Humphries just lucky last season?

Kris Humphries’ career
Season	Team(s)	Age	MP	WP48	WP
2010-2011	New Jersey	25	2061	0.254	10.92
2009-2010	Dallas-New Jersey	24	1221	0.097	2.46
2008-2009	Toronto	23	265	0.118	0.65
2007-2008	Toronto	22	925	0.102	1.97
2006-2007	Toronto	21	670	0.114	1.59
2005-2006	Utah	20	621	-0.016	-0.21
2005-2006	Utah	19	873	-0.047	-0.85

The story is that a young Kris Humphries was not a good player in Utah and was shipped off to Toronto. Here he was actually a productive (average) power forward that was played limited minutes behind more questionable choices. He was also average in Dallas and New Jersey in 2010. Finally last season he was given real minutes and he had a breakout season.

While it is true that last season was an outlier compared to the rest of his career, there are things to keep in mind when it comes to Humphries

Humphries will be 26 this season. This is the year players are in their prime.
Humphries has been a productive big for the last 5 seasons.
The lack of demand for Humphries implies he will be at a discounted rate.

Even if last season was an anomaly, Kris Humphries has traditionally put up numbers on par with the “top” of the power forward market (i.e. David West). Unlike West, Humphries is young and clearly has a huge upside (in contrast, the teams that are signing players like Davis and Landry are not likely to see much benefit from these moves). And the team that ultimately signs Humphries is likely to see more than a few wins and only have to spend relatively few dollars.

-Dre

23 Responses to "Why hasn’t anyone signed Kris Humphries?"

lovethoseknicks says:

December 18, 2011 at 11:54 pm

I’ve been wondering the same thing.

I haven’t watched him play enough to know, but I think part of the reason may be that he is viewed by some people as a poor defender and stat stuffer that fights to take rebounds away from teammates. It could also be that teams are afraid that his crazy personal life could become a distraction to him or the team. That kind of thing might have even played a small part in the Lakers willingness to move Odom so quickly. I read more than one article suggesting LA management wasn’t so thrilled about reality shows etc…
Charles Connaughton says:

December 19, 2011 at 12:23 am

To risk stating the obvious on this site:

1). Kris Humphries does not take a lot of shots, and thus does not put up gaudy scoring totals (despite scoring efficiently when he does shoot). As scoring totals drive player evaluation in the NBA, it is not surprising that Humphries is overlooked in free agency.

2). Kris Humphries has played for some very bad teams, not the least of which was last year’s Nets. Poor players on very good teams are consistently overrated; conversely, excellent players on very bad teams are consistently underrated.

I suggest he’s being overlooked because he was a non-scorer on a bad team last year, and thus cannot possibly be a good player.
thecity2 says:

December 19, 2011 at 5:03 am

His RAPM has been very stable and very bad over the past several seasons. Humphries is a case of a guy with inflated numbers, who wants more salary than he deserves.

http://stats-for-the-nba.appspot.com/players/141.png
xavier.quach says:

December 19, 2011 at 7:13 am

Complicating matters is that dan fegan represents dwight howard and was recently fired by humphries. I suspect that fegan will not deal howard to the nets if humphries is resigned, and the nets have a deal waiting for humphries when/if the howard deal falls through.
Andres Alvarez says:

December 19, 2011 at 9:12 am

Evan,
I don’t like RAPM much as a metric. This is in part because the only paper explaining is not that comprehensive and hard to find.

Alright so RAPM says Humphries is bad and consistently so. First off, why is he bad? What does RAPM say he does bad specifically? Second off, I am a little confused how he is consistent. I agree that his seasons before this one he was pretty consistent in limited playing time. This season his stats were much different. As such if he’s consistent and his stats numbers changed a great deal, what does that say about the metric testing him?
Andres Alvarez says:

December 19, 2011 at 9:15 am

Charles and Xavier,
Wow good feedback! Did not know about the agent story. I would love if there was an agent database somewhere. It would definitely be interesting to compare it with player movements.
Andres Alvarez says:

December 19, 2011 at 11:30 am

Lovethoseknicks,
The “distracting side story” aspect of sports is interesting. Kobe had the rape charges. Carmelo had many distractions before leaving Denver (and that was at his request, not the team’s) Ownerships seem to use offcourt distractions as a useful story for players they don’t like and ignore them quite easily for players they like.
Synthia Rose says:

December 19, 2011 at 12:05 pm

I agree with LoveThoseKnicks who characterized Kris as “stat stuffer that fights to take rebounds away from teammates.”

I think it was very telling when Deron Williams said after the recent exhibition game that Lopez was able to rebound better because Kris wasn’t there “to steal the ball.”

Interesting thing for a teammate to say.
Andres Alvarez says:

December 19, 2011 at 12:26 pm

Synthia,
A few thing.
1. The new and improved Wins Produced actually accounts for “taking rebounds” from your team mates. Even accounting for this Humphries is still very good.
2. On that same note – getting rebounds are a good thing! The “taking them from your team mates” mentality is a little off. Every board Humphries pulls down gets the team the ball, that’s useful. If a player takes a lot of bad shots to pad their points it’s not.
3. Getting rebounds is his job! – Humphries is a Power Forward. His job is to stay close to the hoop and get boards and take easy shots. Last season he did both quite well. Why on earth is Williams (a guard who plays on the perimeter) saying it’s a good thing that it is easier for others to get boards? Imagine if Humphries was re-signed and Williams walked and Humphries said “Man it sure is easier for other players to get assists without Williams hogging all of them”. Would anyone take him seriously?

Anyway it’s still hard to buy that Humphries, who has been an average to great PF, hasn’t been signed while other players that are terrible have been.
Ben Fenton says:

December 19, 2011 at 12:38 pm

I think Kris Humphries represents the classic case of Wins Produced overestimating a player’s true contribution to his team’s success. It makes sense that total rebounds would correlate highly with wins, as a team that is very good at keeping its opponents from scoring will tend to collect more rebounds. But is it necessarily true that players who are collecting the rebounds (which show up in the box score) are the ones that are causing the shots to be missed in the first place? I’m really skeptical. David Lee, for example, is among the league’s least efficient defenders according to Synergy Sports Technology, which catalogs each possession and determines whether a defender prevented his man from scoring, and yet he grabs a high proportion of his team’s rebounds, which inflate his WP numbers. I think Humphries is the same way. While he’s not nearly as bad as Lee according to Synergy, I think that a huge chunk of his rebounds last season were “freebies” that weren’t within reach of opposing players anyway, and that his frontcourt companion Brook Lopez, who’s infamous for his lackadaisical effort on the defensive glass, just didn’t go for. Therefore, I’m pretty sure Humphries just isn’t as good as his WP numbers suggest he is. If he were to share a frontcourt with a rebounding beast like Dwight Howard, I’d bet his WP would decline massively.
Andres Alvarez says:

December 19, 2011 at 1:01 pm

Ben,
We’ll be repeating ourselves a bit. The new Wins Produced adjusts for players that get a higher share of defensive rebounds and penalizes them for it. In short the “they steal rebounds” is not really a valid argument anymore.

On to your second argument. First Wins Produced does have team defense (how well the opponents shoot, turn the ball over, and how well your team blocks) built in. First off players like David Lee, who play a lot of minutes, get dinged for bad defense. Second, we find the defense adjustment is just not as large. This makes a lot of sense as defense really is a team activity.

Anyway onto the defense point. The issue you have is you are overemphasizing defense and under emphasizing rebounds. First off rebounding is part of defense. If you don’t get the ball, guess what? It goes back to the other team. Second, while some players are not hot at defense I think many people overemphasize the effect. Were opponents shooting 100% against David Lee last season?

It’s very interesting that on defense people call players good at rebounding “thieves, and cherry pickers” but on offense players that take lots of questionable shots are called “shot creators”
Brennan Stout says:

December 19, 2011 at 1:51 pm

Kris’ year last year was so grand because Brook Lopez had such a poor rebounding year. The Nets shot so poorly as a teams with an array of chuckers that Kris just had more chances to pull down rebounds and thus boost his PER.
TheNBAGeek says:

December 19, 2011 at 2:05 pm

Love all the comments about rebounds from people that have not read the FAQ.

a) WP already accounts for “stealing” rebounds.
b) I love it when people say things like “I bet if he moved teams, X would happen”.

In particular I love b) because here on this blog, we do this ALL THE TIME. And whenever we’re right, we get ignored (or we hear “blah blah blah you overvalue rebounds blah blah blah team chemistry blah blah blah intangibles”). Cases in point:

When the sixers traded Iverson for Andre Miller, Dave said that Iverson is overrated because he takes bad shots, and Miller is underrated because he shoots efficiently and rebounds well for a PG. He predicted the Nuggets would not get better and that Philly would. Philly improved a lot, and everybody was amazed that, apparently, if the “shot creator” leaves, other players will, in fact, actually shoot more to make up for it. And the Nuggets declined slightly and everyone blamed it on the fact that Melo and Iverson had “no chemistry”.

When the Nuggets traded Iverson for Billups, again, pundits said Detroit was a contender. We said “Uh, Billups is good. Like, REALLY GOOD. Like, ‘superstar’ good. And, uh, Iverson is overrated.” The Nuggets improve greatly, Detroit bombs. Well, it can’t possibly be because there might be something to WP, nah, it’s just “team chemistry”. Iverson changed teammates a lot. Why did pundits always think they lost despite Iverson’s “greatness”? Why didn’t anyone ever speculate that hey, maybe Iverson isn’t really that great? Maybe “shot creation” isn’t, in fact, a thing?

The point is that players change teams all the time. Yet WP48 stats remain remarkably consistent from season to season even when players change teams (see…the…FAQ). So we have, in fact, quite quantitatively dealt with the “I bet X would happen if he played with other players” question.
TheNBAGeek says:

December 19, 2011 at 2:08 pm

Andres,

The biggest factor by far has got to be whether a player was on a winning team. If Davis played for a bad team but put up identical numbers, he would definitely not be in the league (or at least not much more than the minimum).
wiLQ says:

December 19, 2011 at 3:29 pm

Outside of standard angles and Dwight-to-Nets possibility I think there’s another factor which went unnoticed here: all aforementioned PFs either signed short-term deals [1-2 yrs] or long one but “only” for 5-6 M$/y – Kris probably expects high annual salary AND long-term deal which cools off GMs who preserve cap space for 2012 and/or are afraid of new luxury tax rules.
That creates a very short list of possible suitors…
lovethoseknicks says:

December 19, 2011 at 5:22 pm

Andres,

My “stat stuffer” comment wasn’t meant to be a criticism of WOW. I think the new formula addresses most of the concerns about rebounds that have been brought up.

In the case of Humphries, I think people are talking about a kind of outlier where a single player is overly aggressive about competing for rebounds with his own teammates (in the Nets case that would usually be taking rebounds away from Lopez). No box score metric is going to measure that kind of thing if it exists. You have to just see it.
lovethoseknicks says:

December 19, 2011 at 5:34 pm

“Ownerships seem to use offcourt distractions as a useful story for players they don’t like and ignore them quite easily for players they like.”

I think that is certainly true. If you are considered an almost irreplaceable star, management is likely to look the other way unless you become an extreme distraction (perhaps someone like Rodman, Artest etc..) . If you are considered a role player, there is no reason to tolerate anything that’s deemed a negative for the team.
Charles Connaughton says:

December 20, 2011 at 1:40 am

Well look, I’m entirely with everyone saying not to open the vaults for Humphries. He had one stellar year on a bad team playing next to a center having an atrocious year. If I had to bet on it, I’d suspect we’re going to see some amount of regression to the mean here.

That said, Humphries has historically shot efficiently from the field, and he has historically rebounded well. I’d say it’s a fair assumption he will continue to shoot and rebound well in the future, and that any GM who can pick him up at anything resembling a league-average contract would do well to sign him.
AmasaDelano1 says:

December 20, 2011 at 2:02 am

In regards to the “stealing” rebounds debate, the season splits would disagree. Lopez averaged 5.8 rebounds before the All-Star break. During that same stretch, Humphries averaged 8.8 rebounds and played 25.5 minutes. Post break, Lopez averaged 6.4 rebounds while Humphries improved to 14.1 rebounds in 35.7 minutes. In December, when Kris averaged 10 rebounds (his second best month of the season), Lopez averaged 6.3 (his second best month as well). When Hump averaged 24 minutes in November, Lopez averaged 6.1 rebounds, but when Hump averaged 37 minutes in March, Lopez still averaged 6.2 boards. To me it doesn’t add up. Lopez’s rebounding numbers were the same or better when Humphries played more minutes last year.

I’d have to go beyond the statistical implications, because I think Kris has become a valuable player on the court. This is a guy who has a long history (dating back to high school) of being a bad teammate with a “me-first” attitude. I’m sure many of you have probably heard the U. of Kansas recruiting story by now, and if you haven’t you should look it up. I think there’s a reason why Hump has been moved from team to team even as his game has improved, and that reason is hubris. Let’s be honest, how else would you explain the Mavericks’ willingness to ship the 25 year old Humphries off to Jersey for the 33 year old Eduardo Najera after only 25 games? He played well during his time there and was exactly the kind of youthful, hard nosed backup the Mavs had been looking for. I think it was his attitude, and I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to find out that his attitude worsened after having a career year and becoming an instant celebrity thanks to that god-awful show.
Brennan Stout says:

December 20, 2011 at 11:34 am

Brook Lopez says, “Bring me Kris Humphries because I’m a lazy bum on the defensive glass.”

http://basketball.realgm.com/wiretap/217687/Lopez_Admits_To_Being_Lazy_On_Glass_Advocates_For_Humphries_Return

It really is this simple. You could go an develop another formula for this. Eddy Curry is another really poor rebounder. Scott Skiles had one word of advice for Curry to improve his rebounding – “Jump.”
lovethoseknicks says:

December 20, 2011 at 3:39 pm

AmasaDelano1,

Lopez is clearly not a good rebounder, but he has been a better rebounder in the past than he was last year when he was often teamed with an elite rebounder like Humphries.

Your stats seem to refute the idea that Humphries was stealing a few from him, but I think unless you can control for everything it’s really hard to know what was going on.

Lopez had 11 rebounds in 33 minutes against the Knicks the other day without Humphries. One game doesn’t mean much (if anything), but it might be worthwhile to watch how he does when Humphries doesn’t play.
Synthia Rose says:

December 21, 2011 at 9:56 am

LOL. Deron Williams is still making allusions to Humphries selfishness. This is what he said to reporters during today’s practice:

“I saw him (Kris) eating breakfast. He looked pretty good, cutting his pancakes. Dividing up the syrup EVENLY.” LOL.
NBA Analysis: How Good are the Philadelphia 76ers? | Local Philadelphia News Aggregator says:

January 9, 2012 at 4:53 pm

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Was Humphries just lucky last season?

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