Being considered a star in today’s NBA is quite possibly the only thing that matters to players.

Star players have the luxury of financial security, fame and notoriety, and sway. However, while superstars tend to hold mass appeal over entire cities, they are also subject to the mass scrutiny that comes with the territory. A bad game here or a lingering injury there can completely derail their perceived excellence, leading to smaller contracts, less fans, and less sway over an organization.

Therefore, it became a point of curiosity to see how much fluctuation an NBA superstar could see in his life based simply off of on-court performance.

Now, in order to do this, we needed to define a few variables. While hammering down on court production is easy based on in-game statistics, the difficulty lies in establishing how we will gauge their net worth. Since basketball contracts are long-term deals, the money players make is not reflective of their on-court play. Additionally, social mentions and public discourse surrounding a player is subject to the interactions that a player incurs throughout their career.

For instance, it would be near impossible to gauge the volatility of Kyrie Irving’s popularity since he plays alongside the most talked about athlete in the world in LeBron James, his other teammate Kevin Love is in trade rumors, and his head coach was just fired.

Therefore, we decided to stick to what we know best and see if there are direct correlations between the on-court production of a player and the revenue they see from the shoe deals.

The Constants:

We took four players at different stages of their careers and with varying levels of success, and we reviewed their playing stats compared to individual shoe vendor data. The data sample is from a select set of shoe vendors in order to draw correlations from trends in shoe sales. As such, the revenue data should not be interpreted as a comprehensive picture of the player’s total yearly shoe sale revenue.

As a point of note, our individual shoe vendor data has been adjusted by a constant ratio so as to not disclose any confidential information while also allowing trends to remain accurate.

Player stats are from the 2014/15 and 2015-16 season, so as to cover all applicable months in the 2015 calendar year.

The hypothesis is that a player’s off the court revenue is exactly as volatile as their on-court production.