What Should Josh Giddey’s Next Contract Look Like?

After being traded from the Oklahoma City Thunder this past offseason, Josh Giddey seems to be thriving in his new home. In his first season with the Chicago Bulls, Giddey is averaging 14.2 PPG, 7.8 RPG, 6.9 APG, and 1.2 SPG on a career-best 57% true shooting.

He’s gotten even more comfortable since the team traded Zach LaVine in early February, averaging 20.3 PPG, 8.9 RPG, 7.5 APG, and 1.5 SPG on 62.6% tru shooting in his last 20 games.

Giddey’s recent success – coupled with the fact he’ll be a free agent this summer – has many people speculating over what Giddey’s next contract will look like. In the latest edition of The Stein Line, it was reported that Giddey will likely seek a multiyear deal that pays him roughly 30 million dollars a year annually. That’s how much he wants, but how much is he worth?

Keep in mind that Giddey will be a restricted free agent. That means the Bulls can match any offer that is made to him by an opposing team. Still, it is useful to know what amount is an appropriate one for Giddey’s services. So, in this article (like we did for Nickeil Alexander-Walker), we are going to look at three different ways to quantify Giddey’s production into a dollar amount in order to figure out what his next contract should look like.

Method #1: A Revised Version of Seth Partnow’s Formula

In his book, “The Midrange Theory,” current NBA analyst and former Director of Basketball Research for the Milwaukee Bucks, Seth Partnow, discusses a formula that teams use to estimate a player’s monetary value.

In its essence, the formula involves multiplying how many points a player is “worth” by the amount a win “costs” in a given season (we discuss this more in-depth in an article we wrote on Jakob Poeltl in 2022).

The website Dunks & Threes has a statistic called Estimated Wins (EW). And if Giddey continues at his current pace, he’ll have provided 5.5 EW this season. Next year, with a salary cap maximum being estimated to be around 154.6 million dollars, a single win will “cost” roughly 3.8 million dollars.

Based on those two numbers, Giddey should make about 20.9 million dollars next season (roughly 13.5% of the salary cap).

Method #2: The Similarity Score Tool

The emerging website CraftedNBA has a Similarity App feature that allows you to compare any player season to one of the 6,500 seasons in their database (which goes all the way back to the 1977-78 season).

It uses a variety of advanced statistics to compile a list of the most similar seasons to the searched player since 1977. Using this resource, here are the five seasons most comparable to Giddey’s 2024-25 campaign.*

(*Sidebar: For this search, we filtered it so it would only include seasons after 1990 since it can be hard to find reliable salary data from the years prior to that.)

Unfortunately, most of these examples aren’t super useful to our analysis because they came in seasons where the player was on a rookie-scale contract (much like Giddey is right now). The only case study that really works here is Antoine Walker’s 1999-00 season, where Employee Number Eight made 26.5% of the salary cap.

Next season, 26.5% of the salary cap would be 40.9 million dollars – well over the the 30 million dollars Giddey is rumored to be expecting next season.

Method #3: Looking At Recent Precedent

Since the NBA and the National Basketball Player’s Association (NBPA) recently agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement, the only offseasons that compare to the financial landscape we’ll be dealing with this free agency period are the ones from the last two years. So, let’s focus on similar examples from those two cycles.

The most comparable signing to the current Giddey situation in recent memory is Immanuel Quickley’s deal with the Toronto Raptors this past offseason. Like Giddey, Quickley was a good (but not great) point guard, who had just finished his rookie contract, never made an All-Star game, and had been the headlining return piece in a marquee trade in the prior season.

After trading for him midway through the 2023-24 season, the Raptors re-signed Quickley on a five-year, 175-million-dollar deal. At an average annual value of 32.5 million, Quickley will take up 21% of the salary cap next season.

The Bottom Line

Through these three methods, we have narrowed Giddey’s range to somewhere between 20 to 40 million dollars in 2025-26.

In this instance, I think the most reasonable contract would be on the lower end of this spectrum (like Method 1 suggests). Giddey has taken a step forward in the last few months, but his weaknesses as a defender and off-ball offensive player still create real team-building concerns, and he isn’t a great enough on-ball player to fully mask these weaknesses.

Because of his limitations, Giddey should be viewed as a solid starter – meaning a contract with an average yearly value in the low 20s. However, given the precedent set by Quickley’s recent deal, it seems likely that the Bulls will have to meet Giddey’s demands, and give him the 30 million dollar payday he’s searching for.