Nicolas Batum, five years, $120 million, Charlotte Hornets
The Hornets didn’t have much choice but to give Batum this massive deal after they traded Gerald Henderson and Noah Vonleh for him in the summer of 2015. After that, Batum followed up with a career year. Letting him walk in free agency would have destroyed a trade which, at the time, looked great for Charlotte.
However, Batum simply hasn’t lived up to the contract. The drop-off hasn’t been drastic and has mostly come in shooting and defense. Batum looks more like the player who the Portland Trail Blazers deemed expendable than the one who helped carry the Hornets to the playoffs. He shot just 40.3 percent from the field and 33.3 percent from three — both drops from last season.
Defensively, Batum was in the negative on real plus-minus and opposing effective field goal percentage ticked up when he was in the game. All told, Batum’s Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) was just 2.1, his lowest since 2011-12. It wasn’t a massive decline, but for the first of a five-year, nine-figure contract, it was alarming.
This mistake won’t haunt Charlotte like others will to their respective teams. Batum is still a fine wing, he’s just taking up an exorbitant amount of cap space. It limits Charlotte’s options in free agency, and in a couple of years when Batum’s decline is more obvious, it will start to seriously weigh them down.