How much is a basketball player salary

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We are used to NBA players living a luxurious life in multi-million dollar mansions and expensive cars and brands. The salary of an NBA player is unlimited as they also receive bonuses from wins and titles and the base salary. Recently, NBA clubs have also created additional income for players by signing contracts with sponsors such as online casinos.

How much do NBA players make? According to Basketball Reference, the average player salary for the 2020-2021 season is $7.5 million. The highest-paid NBA player is Golden State Warriors point guard Stephen Curry when pocketing $45 million this year.

This average salary is very high compared to the standard level in all US sports leagues. To learn more about wages and the list of NBA players who get paid the highest and lowest, read on with Scott Fujita.

The NBA players get paid an average salary of around $7.5 million. The median salary, as known as middle salary, is about $3.8 million. The Basketball Reference says the salary cap for the 2020-2022 season is $109.1 million.

The NBA’s minimum salary is always much higher than the rest of the sports leagues in North America. If first-time players are selected in the top NBA Draft list, wages are often much higher for NBA rookies (first-time players). New Orleans Pelicans rookie Zion Williamson earns $9.7 million per season. He is the first pick overall of the 2019 NBA Draft.

Wages for veteran players will also increase depending on how long they are in the tournament.

To give a most objective comparison, the NFL only pays its players about $450k. The NHL and MLB set a minimum wage of $500k.

Unlike an average NBA player, the players on the list below receive incredible and admirable salaries. Let’s find out who they are and which team they currently play for.

Shooting machine Steph Curry received an outstanding base salary to become the highest-paid player this season. The Golden State star grossed $92.8 million during this time. The latest step in his career is the announcement of the Curry brand under the support of Under Armor.

The new venture is worth about $20 million a year, with a mix of clothing, shoes, and accessories for various sports. People predicted that this number would increase if it received public love.

Curry’s other ventures include a new endorsement deal with crypto platform FTX. He is also the owner of the production company Unanimous Media with the series Holey Moley.

Second on the list is John Wall, point guard of the Houston Rockets. He has an impressive average of 20.6 PPG, 3.2 RPG, and 6.9 APG during the season. The salary he received was enough to understand how important Wall was to the club.

The past year has been an exciting journey for Russell Westbrook. While his slump in form and transfers between several teams may have affected his image, not his earnings.

With a $44 million starting salary, Westbrook added another $30 million thanks to an impressive partnership with Nike and ten auto dealerships in Southern California.

The Brooklyn Nets have closed one of the biggest deals in NBA history with the Beard, and it was the right decision. Harden’s arrival on the roster keeps the Nets’ record steady.

In December, Harden officially became the investor and creative director of Pura fragrances. The player also benefits from contracts with Art of Sport, BodyArmor, and Stance.

The longtime keeper of the All-NBA team and Portland Trailblazers star rose three spots on the list of highest NBA player salaries this year. Through partnerships and endorsement deals with Gatorade’s Bolt24 product line, Lillard earns a fortune.

Last year, the young man also launched an annual internship program for half a dozen disadvantaged students at New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago high schools.

It would be unbelievable if King James did not appear on the list. With just a $32 million-a-year Nike contract, LeBron James is well on his way to becoming the second billionaire to emerge from the league. That number, combined with a salary of $41.2 million, is enough to put James on the Forbes list of the highest-earning NBA players of 2021.

The SpringHill Company business, his entertainment, and media company, is also notable. They announced a minority stake sale at a valuation of $725 million.

James also joins fitness company Tonal as a brand ambassador and investor. He also allows Fortnite to use the image to create lovable characters.

Kevin Durant’s base salary is admirable, but he’s also an investing genius.

In December, technology company Uber bought the food delivery service Postmates for $2.65 billion. Durant invested back in this startup in 2016 with $1 million. The current figure is already $15 million.

Durant’s Thirty-Five Ventures is also expected to make a lot of money investing in many other companies. These include online banking Mercury, fantasy sports startup Sleeper, and investing apps Robinhood and Acorns.

Paul George will be making money this season for The Clippers without his teammate Kawhi Leonard for the foreseeable future. However, momentum will be high when the 31-year-old begins a four-year, $190 million contract extension

His partners include Nike, Gatorade, AT&T, and he recently became an investor in-home gym company Tonal.

Defending champion Giannis Antetokounmpo deserves to be on the list of the highest-paid players of 2021.

The huge five-year $228 million contract with Milwaukee is an impossibility.

Antetokounmpo still has a lot of growth potential at only 26 years old. More specifically, he seems to have discussed with Disney a documentary about the star’s journey from Greece to the NBA champion. Forbes says the film will be released in 2022.

The Golden State Warriors shooting guard suffered one of the most unfortunate injuries in sports history. Even so, he is still making a tremendous amount of money. The All-Star member joined Paul Rodriguez, Alex Morgan, and Travis Pastrana to launch Just Live, a CBD brand.

The star also has endorsement deals with Mercedes-Benz, Kaiser Permanente, and Tissot. A source said Thompson is in talks with Chinese shoe partner Anta.

There isn’t a single player with the lowest salary, but players with two-way contracts with the G-League are the NBA players receiving the most inadequate compensation.

They make an average of $77k per year and an additional minimum wage by the size of rookies from the NBA.

During the NBA preseasons and summer camps, NBA teams often invite G-League players to play for them. Players will receive 45 days of play for their favorite NBA teams. For players who hit the max, their annual salary falls around $400k.

The NBA players get paid an average salary of $7.5 million a year for the 2020-2021 season. This number is not minor, and it proves the popularity and love of the audience for the tournament.

With the news that the salary cap for the new season will be more comprehensive, we will be ready to expect impressive performances and talented faces to shine on the court.

How Much Do NBA Players Make? Average Salary from 1990-2022

During the inaugural 1946 NBA season, the highest-earning player in the league was Tom King of the Detroit Falcons with a yearly salary of $16,500.

The reason he was the highest paid player in the league? He got paid for being a player as well as the teams business manager AND publicity director!

Since then, things have changed drastically. Salaries in the NBA had been rising steadily for decades, but the last TV deal in 2016 supercharged this development and increased salaries by over 60% within only 3 years.

It’s fair to say, that NBA players don’t have to worry about feeding their family, but just how rich are they really? Let’s find out!

How much does an average NBA player make?

For this analysis I used data from basketball-reference.com. Salary data is not officially reported by the NBA, so these numbers might not be 100% accurate, but they should be close enough to give a very good idea of the evolution of NBA salaries. To clean up the data I removed 10-day players and two-way contracts and only looked at players earning at least the relevant minimum salary.

We can see that the average salary during the 1990-91 season was just below $1M and has grown by over 8x since then to around $8.5M in 2021-22.

From 1991 to 2009 the average salary grew consistently before hitting a rough spot following the financial crisis in 2008 and the subsequent new collective bargaining agreement in 2011 that lowered player salaries from 57% of basketball related income to around 50%.

Before the 2016-17 season the NBA signed a new TV deal with ESPN and Turner Sports worth roughly $2.6B a year (up nearly 200% from the previous deal) and we can see the explosion of salaries after the deal was signed. Average NBA salary grew from $5.2M in 2016 to $8M in only 3 years!

From 2020-21 to 21-22 salaries didn’t grow any further, probably a result of revenue losses due to the Covid pandemic.

Average NBA Salary by Position

Taking a look at salary by positions it’s interesting to see that from 1990-2000 Center was the highest paid position every year.

Dominant big guys like Patrick Ewing, Shaq, Alonzo Mourning or David Robinson are among the most expensive players during this period.

From 2000, power forwards take over the top spots but we can still observe a clear trend where big guys are consistently paid better than other positions.

This changed around 2020 where all of the sudden point guards are the best paid players in the NBA with Steph Curry, Russell Westbrook and James Harden ranking 1-3 in 2022.

How Much Do NBA Starters and Bench Players Make?

For this analysis, I defined bench players as players who started less than half of their games and starters as players that started more than half of their games.

Unsurprisingly, starters have always earned more than bench players, but lately the difference has grown tremendously. In 2019, starters made about 2.5x compared to bench players. In 2021/22 this increased to almost 4x!

Distribution of Salaries in the NBA

An average salary of $8.

5M sounds amazing, but the salaries of NBA players are not distributed evenly at all. In 2021/22, five players made more than $40M of yearly salary (Steph Curry, Russell Westbrook, James Harden, Lebron James and Kevin Durant) while 93 players made less than $2M.

The median salary in 2021/22 is $4,347,600, that means that 50% of NBA players make less than $4,347,600. So average salary is heavily skewed by a few players making insane amounts of money, while most of the NBA makes much less.

Another way to measure the inequality of the distribution of salaries is the Gini coefficient. It’s a number between 0 and 1, where 0 shows a perfectly equal population (so every NBA player would make the exact same amount) and numbers close to 1 show a very unequal society (Lebron James makes $1B and the rest plays for free).

We can see that the Gini coefficient spiked significantly from 1995 – 1997 following the signing of a new collective bargaining agreement but has been relatively stable since then.

Overall, a gini coefficient around 50% is quite high and shows a significant level of inequality in the NBA. NBA salaries are also distributed more unequally compared to American household data gathered from the US census bureau.

NBA salaries by Player Age

Going through the raw numbers of the data I collected I thought it would be interesting to take a look at salaries vs production of NBA players. You often hear that NBA players are paid for past performance, not necessarily how good they are right now.

From the graph we can see that points per game production peaks at age 28 (at 10.1ppg), while salary peaks much later at 33 (where ppg have dropped to 8.13).

The shape of both lines are very similar but salary correlates best with the production 4 years prior. So mathematically speaking, NBA players get paid according to their PPG from 4 years ago.

NBA Salary by Player Height

There is an old saying in basketball: “You can’t teach height”.

That made me wonder whether big players are actually paid more since they are harder to come by than 6ft point guards?

The scatter chart shows that there is no perfect correlation between size and average salary but we can definitely observer a trend were taller players are paid more on average than smaller players.

Between 1990 and 2022 and filtering for heights with at least 100 player-seasons, players at 5’11 (DJ Augustin, Ty Lawson) were the cheapest while players at 7’1 (Shaq O Neal, Rudy Gobert etc.) where the most expensive.

Final Thoughts

For this article I gathered a lot of information on stats and salaries from basketballreference.com and cleaned it to allow for easy analysis.

Is there anything interesting that I missed? Let me know in the comments and I’ll add it to the article!

Forbes named the highest paid NBA players

American Forbes named the highest paid NBA players of the 2020/21 season. LeBron James topped the ranking for the seventh time, his earnings this year will break another record The top five of last year's rankings have retained their positions this season as well.

Finished reading here

For the seventh year in a row, LeBron James remains the highest paid player in the NBA, based on his off-court contracts. He is expected to earn an NBA player-record $95.4 million, including approximately $64 million from advertising and other projects. Half of the athlete's advertising revenue is provided by a contract with Nike. According to Forbes, James is the highest paid athlete in US team sports.

The most expensive sponsorship deals in the NBA. Forbes rating

Second place goes to Stephen Curry with $74.4 million in revenue, of which $40 million comes from his sponsorship contracts and other projects. For example, in December, sportswear manufacturer Under Amour launched the Curry brand, within which it will present shoes, clothing and accessories for various sports. The contract is valued at $20 million a year, but the amount could rise if the brand becomes popular.

Kevin Durant is back in third place with $65.2 million. Russell Westbrook is fourth with $58.1 million and James Harden rounds out the top 5 with $50 million.

NBA investor: Basketball player who raised $125 million in real estate

NBA salaries have been cut by 20% this season due to the pandemic, but third-party contracts keep basketball's biggest stars among the highest paid athletes in the world. The top ten NBA players in the 2020/21 season are projected to earn a total of $558 million..5 million per player. That's more than double the average baseball player's salary and three times the average football player's salary. This season, 44 NBA players were supposed to receive a salary of at least $25 million, but due to salary cuts, 34 such athletes remained.

10 highest paid NBA players 2019. Forbes rating

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Marina Dulneva

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#NBA #Forbes rating #basketball #sport

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How much players earn in different leagues.

Europrobasket study

The Europrobasket academy has released a comprehensive study on how much money foreigners earn in the top European championships. "Interception" carefully translated everything.

Important:

1) the amounts are in dollars, not in euros, as usual;

2) believe it or not, it's up to you, but the authors of the work say that in the process of preparation they talked with many agents, coaches and team members.

Average salary in Europe:

Spain. The strongest teams play in the ACB League, many Spanish clubs play in European competitions. Accordingly, there are the best salaries, and the budgets of Real Madrid and Barcelona exceed $40 million. On average, players in Spain make from 250 to 500 thousand per season, but there are exceptions: for example, Nikola Mirotic with his $ 4 million a year or Sergio Yull, Walter Tavares, Corey Higgins - they all earn about $ 2 million.

Turkey. Two teams from the Turkish championship play in the Euroleague, several more clubs in the Eurocup and the Champions League. The country has some of the highest salaries and almost half of the clubs have budgets in excess of $10 million. Leaders can get big money, for example: Shane Larkin - $ 3.7 million, Nando de Colo - 2.4 million, Jan Vesely - 2.2 million. At the same time, on average, foreigners earn 250-500 thousand in the league.

Russia. Some of the highest paid players in Europe play here. For example, Alexei Shved ($4 million last season, this amount may differ), Mike James and Nikola Milutinov (2.5 million each). But the average salary in the United League is about 200-450 thousand dollars per year.

Italy. Few people expected this country to be so high in the ranking, but elite basketball players also play in the Italian championship. For example, Milan defender Sergio Rodriguez, who receives about $ 2 million, is the highest paid player this season. On average, the salaries of foreigners in Serie A range from 180 to 350 thousand dollars.

Germany. The German economy is the fourth largest in the world, so it's not surprising to see the Bundesliga in this ranking. Four championship teams at once have more than $10 million for the season, and the budget of one of them, Bayern, is as much as $25 million. 1 million

Greece. The economic crisis has played a role in the amounts that foreigners earn in this country. But the Greek league is played by top basketball players, and three teams have budgets over $10 million (including Olympiakos, which plays in the second division). The average salary here is from 150 to 250 thousand, although Nick Calathes received 2.25 million at Pao last season, and Kostas Sloukas now at Olya - 1.8 million.

Israel. Teams from here do not shine in Europe, and the money here is much lower. The exception is Maccabi, whose budget is $26.5 million, and point guard Scotty Wilbekin earns $1.7 million. But this is not the norm, but the norm - from 80 to 250 thousand dollars.

France. Only two teams from here have a budget of more than $10 million, but this is one of the most reliable countries in terms of payments - contracts are guaranteed by the French government. Interestingly, only 30% of clubs' budgets go towards paying players, while in the rest of Europe these expenses account for more than half of club budgets. On average, foreigners here earn from 80 to 200 thousand dollars a season. Two years ago, the highest paid ASVEL player was AJ Slaughter with a salary of 300 thousand.

Average salary in Asia:

China. The CBA is considered one of the richest leagues in the world, and most importantly, it is watched by more than 500 million people. This means that you can just come, play and build a business.

Stephon Marbury did just that: he earned $12 million in six years with the Beijing Ducks and became such a star that a statue of him was erected in front of the former team's arena. He went into coaching before starting his own company and selling basketball shoes to kids who can't afford branded shoes. Bliss? Bliss. Legend and forever secured.

The average salary of a foreigner in the Chinese championship is from 1 to 3 million dollars. That is, 4-6 times higher than in the most wasteful country in Europe - Spain. Tracy McGrady, Gilbert Arenas, Steve Francis, Ron Artest received so much in China. But there are exceptions, for example, Lance Stevenson, who is paid 4 million by the Liaoning Flying Leopards. .

The difficulty is that teams are allowed to have only two foreign players. But there are 19 clubs in the CBA, so they're really spending a lot.

South Korea. The rules of the local championship provide for a limit on foreign players - there can be no more than two of them in each team. If there are two foreigners in the club, then the ceiling of their total salary is set at the level of 700 thousand dollars, and if there is one, then by 500 thousand. On average, a legionnaire in KBL receives 250-400 thousand dollars, which puts the Korean championship on the same level with Spain, Turkey and Russia in this indicator.

But this is official information. A whole scattering of Europrobasket sources indicates that, together with bonuses, salaries here can reach up to 800 thousand dollars, which means that only China pays more.

However, remember that if you want to play in Korea, then get ready for 3-4 practices a day.

Japan. In 2016, two leagues were united here, and now the championship is flourishing. First of all, this concerns salaries: the local players in the season before last received an average of 147 thousand dollars, the players of the Japanese national team - about 417 thousand. Today, the highest paid Japanese - Yuki Togashi - earns $ 1 million.

Legionnaires in Japan receive an average of 120 to 300 thousand dollars. Life in this country is expensive, but teams tend to take care of all the expenses of their basketball players.

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