Howard vs. Okafor

Even though the Charlotte Bobcats have only been an NBA franchise for three complete seasons, with the 2007-08 season being their fourth, the front office of the team has always made a a number of questionable roster decisions. With the franchise's first draft pick ever, when the Bobcats selected Emeka Okafor second overall in the 2004 draft (one slot behind Dwight Howard), a precedent was established which has since become a disturbing trend when it comes to drafting players. The Bobcats have made a habit of only drafting college basketball veterans who really have little to no potential to improve on the NBA level since they have already reached their ceiling by the time they put on the Bobcats jersey. This problem will only be exacerbated by the naming of Michael Jordan as managing member of basketball operations for the Bobcats. Ever since he drafted the largely useless Kwame Brown (at least as a basketball player), Jordan has been afraid to draft anyone based on potential, resulting in his teams being worse than they should be.

Such an auspicious past is reason why I am about to heap a goodly amount of praise on the Charlotte Bobcats franchise for not giving in to Okafor's contract demands when he asked to receive the same amount of money as Dwight Howard when Howard signed a maximum five-year, $85 million contract extension; the Bobcats offered Okafor only around $13 million a year for five years instead. When Howard signed his deal, he subsequently set the market value for all players who play his position, which Okafor happens to do. Therefore, for Okafor to be paid at least the same amount of money as Howard, he would have had to show himself to be a better player than Howard over the past three years.

The problem with Okafor's wanting the same kind of deal as Howard is he is not as good as Howard, either offensively or defensively so he should expect to be paid less or in other words commensurate with his basketball ability. One would think someone who majored in finance at UCONN and claims to be good at math would understand that and take the completely fair deal offered to him. Even though Okafor has averaged 2.5 more field goal attempts per game than Howard over his first three NBA seasons, he has averaged .6 points per less per game. Okafor is statistically significantly worse at getting to the free throw line than Howard (4.6 FTA per game to 6.8 FTA per game), at shooting from the field (50.4 TS% to 58.6 TS%), and at rebounding (19.7 RbR to 18.2 RbR). The only facet of the game in which Okafor is appreciably better than Howard is in keeping his turnovers lower, but that is only good for ten sandbags against a tsunami. Another indictment against Okafor is his offensive rating increased the lighter his offensive load was made. Meanwhile, Howard is taking a more dominant role in the Magic offense and showing he can still be efficient with more usage. Defensively, Okafor has only a career defensive rating of 104 to Howard's 102 with the lower number indicating a better defensive player.

Statistics aside, Dwight Howard holds another advantage over Emeka Okafor that makes him a much safer investment for any team willing to hand out max contracts. Three season Howard has completed in the NBA and he has yet to miss a regular-season contest. Okafor, on the other hand, has failed to appear in eighty games out of a possible 246.

If some team does decide to pay Okafor $17 million a year, I will not begrudge him the money, but it is clearly obvious he does not deserve to be paid more than Howard and so when he is not, he should not be surprised again and cut off talks with an NBA team, lest he find himself without a team to play for.