Well, I did it again. I sat down at my computer and tried to write a big persuasive opinion piece on Willie Cauley-Stein. I tried to form a strong argument for why the Kings should or should not extend him, why they should or should not trade him, or even whey they should let him hit restricted free agency. When will I learn? Willie's value is too hard to pin down at this point in his career, and even harder to project. It's his intangibles that define him -€” or more precisely -€” that define his indefinability. There are no effort stats. There are no decision making or body language stats. There are no did-he-live-up-to-his-potential stats. It's time to come to grips with the reality that, like politics and religion, Willie's future with this team is just not polite conversation in a civilized society. Every Kings fan has a strong opinion on him, and it's not based on numbers or hard facts. People just have a gut feeling about him, and a bunch of words on a computer screen isn't going to change that. I might as well wear a white shirt with a black tie and ride my bicycle door to door around Sacramento offering prophecies of frontcourt salvation to anyone who will listen.

So after deleting a half dozen rough drafts, taking a cold shower, and shaking a can full of pennies that I usually reserve for training my dog in my own face, I decided to present something more simple and objective. The reason I wanted to write about WCS in the first place is because he becomes eligible for a contract extension in less than two months. So rather than form an opinion on what the Kings should do, I instead just did some research on what an extension for the big man would probably look like, if that is the route the Kings pursue. Or more specifically, what extensions have looked like for players like him in the recent past. I did so by searching the last ten seasons for players who posted similar production under similar circumstances, and looking at the contracts they signed after their rookie-scale deal. The parameters of the search were as follows:

• Height: 6'10" to 7'2"
• Age: 22 to 26
• Years in league: 2 to 4
• Min/G: 24.0 to 32.0
• PTS/G: 11.0 to 14.0
• REB/G: 6.0 to 8.0

The search yielded ten results, including Willie. I eliminated Yi Jianlian due to the numerous injuries that quickly ended his career and kept him from getting a second multi-year contract. Jianlian never played more than 66 games in a season while Willie has never played less than that, so it seems fair to exclude him from the list. That leaves us with eight comps for Willie's 2017-18 season. Let's take a look at them here:

This is a great representative sample. The composite, shown in bold, of these eight similar seasons create a set of averages that are almost identical to Willie's numbers. While his blocks and FG% are on the lower end of the spectrum, he makes up for it nicely with high-end steal and assist rates. As far as basic stats go, this is a bigger and better basis for analysis than I had expected. I also pulled up advanced stats for each of the players listed. Out of nine, WCS ranked 6th in Win Shares, 4th in Value Over Replacement Player, and 5th in both PER and BPM. That's dead center. When looking at all the numbers together, it's reasonable to say that Cauley-Stein should expect to earn about as much as the average of these players. So when trying to predict the terms for an extension, this is a starting place that I feel very good about.

All eight of the players listed went on to sign multi-year deals when their rookie contracts expired. I have compiled those contracts in the table below. The real terms are shown first, along with the salary cap (in millions) at the time they were signed. I then adjusted them to their current value using cap inflation, attempting to represent what those contracts would look like today:

These contracts are no joke. They are long term, big money deals. Most of them are worth over $20 million per year in today's cap climate, which is projected to inflate by another 7% next offseason. Some of the contracts worked out, and some did not. Marc Gasol made multiple All-Star appearances over the life of his deal and got an even bigger contract when his second one was up. Roy Hibbert, on the other hand, slowly watched his efficiency and playing time slip away, and found himself out of the league at 30 years old. I cannot predict which type of results Cauley-Stein will have in the long run. While a contract does try to estimate the value a player will bring to an organization over time, it's far from an exact science and it ends up relying mostly on what the player is right now. That was the point of this exercise for me. I wanted to find out who in the past was most like what Willie is now, and what type of contract that performance earned them. I feel I got my answer. I can now say that if the Kings want to keep him around, I would consider any extension for Willie Cauley-Stein for around 4 years and $80 million to be a fair deal. More importantly, I've come to accept that, whatever personal feelings I may have about him, Willie is going to get a big payday in the near future, and he's going to have earned it.