The Johnny Lingo Effect: When NBA Players Grow Into Their Contracts

A screenshot from Johnny Lingo, in all it's 1969 glory.

If your family is anything like mine, then you grew up watching Johnny Lingo. It’s a short film with a cheesy, heart-warming message, and I’m sure I’ve seen it upwards of fifty times. Let me tell you the story.

Johnny Lingo (that’s his name) is a shrewd Polynesian trader who goes back to his home village to select a wife. The custom was to pay the woman’s father, in cows, for his daughter—maybe one or two cows for a Nice Personality, and up to five for a looker. Johnny chooses the town’s ugliest girl, Mahanna, and everyone assumes it’s so he can get her on the cheap—until he offers and pays eight cows for her hand. Later we discover that Mahanna has blossomed into a gorgeous woman, and it was Johnny’s gift of self-worth that caused the change. Something something something, happily ever after.

The whole point of the thing is that she turns into someone actually worth eight cows—to the extent that, at the end of the movie, her father accuses Johnny of cheating him by paying only eight cows for a girl clearly worth ten (tip: don’t suggest to your wife how many cows she might be worth). Johnny, that sly dog, knew what he was getting from the beginning. He knew that Mahanna had a high ceiling, you could say. Ridiculous upside.

It’s a nice introduction to any Sunday School lesson. But it also throws into stark relief an enormous mistake that a lot of NBA GM’s make, and that we’re probably going to see a lot more of this summer. This movie’s 25 minutes of cinematic goofiness are so deeply embedded in my psyche that I’ve come to call it the Johnny Lingo Effect.

The mistake is counting on a player to grow into a contract. We’ve seen it a hundred thousand times—a player has a good season or two, maybe a good playoff performance, and a GM hurriedly gives them a massive contract that they’re not worth. The GM is trying to catch a wave… by overpaying the player now, they can lock them up for a few years. Surely the huge contract will spur the Johnny Lingo Effect, and the player will blossom into someone worth that much money.

But how often does it happen? We have a laundry list a mile long of players that haven’t lived up to the size of their contracts (are you really going to make me cite examples? Eddy Curry, Jermaine O’Neal, and Rashard Lewis come to mind without pausing to think). There are a few possible candidates, but in each case it’s still a stretch to say that they grew into their contract—and you can almost certainly say it wasn’t the money that did it. The mythical Johnny Lingo Effect is alive and well in the minds of some GM’s, but to find a player that has actually shown it is a major exception to the rule.

That said, Joe Johnson could be one. He wasn’t worth his pay when he arrived in Atlanta in 2005, with a freshly-minted contract of $70 million over five years. They only won 26 games in his first season there, and the year-over-year improvement was marginal (30 wins the following year, then 37, then 47). But this year, ignoring the past, the Armadillo Cowboy is a key cog on one of the Eastern Conference’s top teams. It’s true that his individual numbers haven’t changed at all this year, so maybe he hasn’t even improved at all, but it’s a lot easier to justify his solid contract when the team is gearing up for a deep playoff run.

With his free agency this summer, though, is another GM going to count on the Johnny Lingo Effect kicking in for Joe Johnson again? Probably. With so many teams clearing out big cap space without actually having a shot at LeBron James or Dwyane Wade, it’s likely that a GM will offer Johnson a max contract, with the hopes that someday he’ll be worth it. He won’t, he’s not a difference maker; talented as he is, he’s not the guy that’s going to take the team on his back and carry them to crucial wins. But you just know that some naïve GM is going to have cap space burning a hole in his pocket, and he’s going to overpay.

Amar’e Stoudemire and Rudy Gay are prime candidates, too. When all the A-level free agents are used up, look for an aspiring team (Chicago, maybe, or the Clippers) to spend too much on one of these mostly-unproven guys.

It’s tempting to think that superstar treatment would have the Johnny Lingo Effect on Stoudemire. He’s certainly a talented player, and he’s capable of putting up huge numbers. But how big will his numbers be on a slower-paced team? Will he play defense on a team that requires it? Is his ego going to get in the way (I know the answer to this one: yes). But without a substantial change, it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll see much improvement from Stoudemire, though his physical skills are tremendous. He needs a mentor; he needs someone to teach him maturity and respect. He needs a couple of summers with Team USA (remember how amped up LeBron and D-Wade were after that experience?). But if he was going to blossom into a max player on his own, he would have done it by now (he’s been in the league a year longer than LeBron).

I’m a big fan of Rudy Gay, but I can’t help seeing him as more of a Scottie Pippen-type (minus the defense). If he’s planning on becoming a max-earning superstar, he should be starting now. The problem is that he doesn’t really stand out among Memphis’s starting five—and a max player needs to be a team leader, or he’s not worth his salt.

An interesting case, though, is his teammate Zach Randolph. He wasn’t worth his behemoth contract with the Knicks or with the Clippers. But suddenly, with the Grizzlies, he’s getting his 20-and-11 per game and not destroying the team. The Grizz are at .500 and just 3.5 games out of the playoffs—up from an abysmal .283 last year. He’s had his first All-Star season next to Gay, Marc Gasol, O.J. Mayo, and Mike Conley, and they’ve formed a very solid starting five. In Z-Bo’s case his success might have more to do with fitting in with his team than with actually growing into his contract, but at least you can make the argument that he’s worth his $16 million this year. Never thought I’d say that.

If the new CBA does come down with a hard cap it will cause havoc among the players, but it might all end up being for the better. GM’s are always going to overpay players, we know that. But if it becomes harder to overpay by a lot, then everyone benefits—the GM saves money and the team doesn’t tie up their financial future in one player, for starters. The player gets less money, clearly, but in the end they benefit from not having the huge contract held over their head (does anybody have good feelings toward Eddy Curry these days? Didn’t think so).

Ultimately, I think it’s fair to say that the Johnny Lingo Effect is absolutely never, in any case, worth counting on from a GM point of view. The best players in the league show their stripes early on, so it’s not really a guessing game—if a guy seems like a middling player early in his career, it’s a fairly safe bet that he’ll be middling for most of his career.

In the scene showing Johnny Lingo’s wedding, some boys hide in the bushes and taunt the not-yet-happy couple with a rhyme: “Johnny Lingo had a cow, trade it for an ugly wife. Johnny Lingo’s married now, he’ll be sorry all his life!”

Or, at least, until the contract expires.