"How Much Money Did The Knee Injury Cost Nerlens Noel?"

Deadspin:

If we assume that a healthy Nerlens Noel goes first or second in an historically thin NBA draft, he lost somewhere between $4 million and $5 million over the next three years—all because he vaporized his knee in February while playing amateur basketball as a nominally unpaid intern at Kentucky.

According to the NBA's rookie salary scale, Noel would have been owed an average of $4.6 million per year over the next three seasons if he had been drafted No. 1 overall, and about $4.1 million per year if he had been taken at the No. 2 spot. But Noel fell to the sixth spot in the draft, and he's set to make around $2.7 per year during his first three seasons in the league.

Why the drop?

... it was almost certainly the injury, a torn ACL, that sandbagged Noel. "The knee looks bad," an anonymous executive told ESPN.