National Basketball Association

What will the Memphis Grizzlies' high payroll mean for their win total?

Published Jun. 30, 2017 6:28 p.m. ET

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The Memphis Grizzlies have one of the highest payrolls in the league this season; is there a correlation between team payrolls and victories or is there a case of “mo money, mo problems”?

According to numbers acquired from Basketball-Reference.com, the Memphis Grizzlies have the fourth-highest paid squad entering the 2015-2016 season at $112,502,305. This isn’t really surprising, considering Marc Gasol is already making north of $20,000,000 per year, the team used Mike Conley’s Bird Rights to sign him to the largest guaranteed deal in the NBA history and also gave Chandler Parsons a max deal. The Grizzlies are only behind the Cavaliers, Clippers and Trail Blazers heading into the season (and the Cavaliers, who are at close to $118,000,000, haven’t even re-signed J.R. Smith yet…).

In theory, paying players higher salaries usually means they perform better on the court, right?

Well, I took a look at correlation between wins and payrolls from last season. You can check out the results here or on the graph below.

View post on imgur.com

In case you’re wondering where the Memphis Grizzlies fit in that graph, I highlighted them below.

View post on imgur.com

So, to answer the original question at hand, there does appear to be correlation. Of course, there’s going to be outliers: the 21-win Brooklyn Nets with their $84,000,000 payroll and the 44-win Portland Trail Blazers, who had the lowest in the league (though, are third-highest this season after matching Allen Crabbe and retaining the rest of their core).

You can’t bank on this meaning the Grizzlies will have home-court advantage in the first round, but it is promising. Plus, for what it’s worth, the team with the fourth-highest payroll last season did win an NBA-record 73 wins.

For a full list of the Grizzlies’ players’ salaries for this season, check out the list below, which is also courtesy of Basketball Reference.

	Mike Conley	$26,540,100
	Chandler Parsons	$22,116,750
	Marc Gasol	$21,165,675
	Zach Randolph	$10,361,445
	Brandan Wright	$5,700,000
	Tony Allen	$5,505,618
	Vince Carter	$4,264,057
	Troy Daniels	$3,332,940
	James Ennis	$2,898,000
	Wade Baldwin	$1,793,760
	Jordan Adams	$1,465,080
	Deyonta Davis	$1,369,229
	Jarell Martin	$1,286,160
	Tony Wroten	$1,050,961
	JaMychal Green	$980,431
	Andrew Harrison	$945,000
	D.J. Stephens	$874,636
	Wayne Selden	$543,471
	Troy Williams	$543,471