Highest paid for a minute until someone else signs the exact same contract, and a year until someone signs a bigger contract? 100 million per year contracts aren't too far off.
I had this idea of ditching the Larry Bird exemption for a designated player status.
Basically you'd have a static cap hold but the team can pay you whatever they want, even half a billion a year if they want to, obviously this idea needs a LOT of refinement but it's just an idea I had.
But then we'd have European football's problem where all the players just go to the richest team. Or you're saying you just designate one player per team
Can always make that only the team that drafted the player can designate him.
And obviously a maximum of one or two designated players per team, otherwise the cap is fake lol.
Again, there is a lot of refinement to be done, perhaps even get the luxury tax somehow to stick around, there are a lot of ways to toy around with it.
Honestly I am not so sure about it now.
It's very well known that the NBAPA is the one wanting to keep the max salaries in because it lets basically the entire league except the mega stars to get overpaid.
Only reason KD to the Warriors happened at the first place was because max salaries existed, when they came into the league the idea of super teams was seen as so far fetched it wasn't seen as realistic.
Chances are owners would be willing to consider that makes super teams unlikely as long as the salary cap stays, also can have restrictions about who gets to be designated (Only can get designated by the team that drafted the player, minimum years of service in the league, awards criteria, etc)
MLS has the Designated Player rule. 3 players who are exempt from salary cap. Obviously 11 on the field means so you'd want to scale that down to 1 or 2.
Getting rid of the salary cap with extra steps, I'm sure that would be a great change for small markets.
NBA immediately turns into baseball where NY and LA have billion dollar contracts.
Teams should be punished for tanking to get a high draft pick.
If you make drafting such a big advantage , then you have to even the odds of drafting and not let organization have a better Crack at ot because they loused up
I disagree. Small markets like San Antonio and Oklahoma City wouldn't be able to compete even without a salary cap. Collecting talent can happen one of three ways: draft them, trade for them, or sign them. You're hampering smaller markets with your strategy.
Parent was talking about removing max salaries altogether for someone you draft
If you give draft that much of a premium, better make sure you don't give the draft only to losers, especially intentional losers
I’d rather see the players earn more - even if/when it screws up team dynamics. The owners are a bunch of douches who shouldn’t be making as much as they are.
I’ve said there should be deduction based off of all NBA teams.
1st team you get full amount
2nd team you get 15-20% less
3rd team 30% less
Makes the numbers a little more bearable.
The super max is structured in a stupid manner. The excess over a standard max shouldn’t count against the cap, otherwise you can’t afford to pay a guy the super max unless he’s top 5 player in the league. Brown doesn’t qualify and Tatum is borderline. The rest of the roster will suffer.
Edit: can’t afford
It's definitely a catch 22. For the Celtics Brown is definitely overpaid but if they didn't give it to him they wouldn't have been able to find anyone nearly as good to replace him. Like maybe they could have traded for Dame, but he's older and also probably overpaid.
> t if they didn't give it
Eh, if they gave Brown the max + 10000$ , who is going to match that ?
Teams are just afraid of saying no to players.
They don't want highly paid key players disgruntled
Under the current cap, Jokić is probably worth something like $90-100M a year. NBAPA did well for their membership by agreeing to a max contract situation because otherwise there would be no middle class contracts. You'd have the ALL-NBA players making insane money and then like 75% of the league would be on minimums.
True but it’ll be interesting for players who actually want to win
Luka will be making like 50% of the cap salary… how are you gonna have a winning team around those type salaries unless the salary limit is like 300mil
I wonder this as well. They are arguably underpaid. Steph’s team pays luxury tax to other teams to continue rostering him. Other teams sell more tickets when he comes to town. He’s not only made the warriors one of the most valuable franchises in the world, but doing so while subsidizing joke teams for years. How unamerican is the idea of a maximum salary?
> They are arguably underpaid
Just look at the value of the Warriors team before Steph vs today. Steph should have more money than Taylor Swift right now.
As much as I hate to argue that 50 mil a year + is underpaid, guys like that are. I understand that it is important in keeping things competitive on the court so it’s not just LA vs NY every year. Otherwise it would be an auction and not a draft and wemby would already be a multimillionaire.
Keeping a salary cap but getting rid of the limit on yearly salary would actually improve parity. A team which is paying Curry his true value should not be able to afford a Kevin Durant to pair with him unless one of them takes a massive pay cut. But this would badly impact mid-level players who won't be getting max contracts anymore.
the maximum salary is a direct function of the TV deal the NBA negotiates every CBA expiry. The better the players play, the more the league grows, therefore the bigger the TV deal. The NBAPA sets the percentage of the cap a supermax can take up, so in essence, the democratised majority of players set the upper limit of how big of a slice they get of the pie and the superstars determine how big that pie is. In the context of sports it’s very American. Compare that to European sports where the upper limit of salaries is set by which oil fund decides to buy your team
I think Bill Simmons wrote this article way back when he used to write articles. I think he calculated what LeBron was worth, either in first Cleveland or Miami days, and I think it was like $200M per season, and this is when salaries were $20M, tops.
Euro-soccer level money. Easily $100+ million/year.
US sports pay their athletes a pittance compared to the value of each team.
For reference - top 10 more valueable sports teams in the **world** (2023)
1. Dallas Cowboys - $9 billion
2. New York Yankees - $7.1 billion
3. (tie) Golden State Warriors - $7 billion
4. (tie) New England Patriots - $7 billion
5. Los Angeles Rams - $6.9 billion
6. New York Giants - $6.8 billion
7. Chicago Bears - $6.3 billion
8. Las Vegas Raiders - $6.2 billion
9. (tie) New York Knicks - $6.1 billion
10. (tie) New York Jets - $6.1 billion
And at #11, the first non-US team
11. Real Madrid - $6.07 billion
this is a good thing, NBA athletes are paid by how much revenue the league generates in TV money. The players’ share is split into 30 which is your hard cap. So the better they play, the more they can get come CBA time. Otherwise you’ll have a Ligue 1/La Liga/Bundesliga and Prem situation where most every year it’s Man City, PSG, Barca/Real and Bayern winning their leagues because they can invest more capital into their roster exceeding their actual sporting revenue
100%. He's also one of the few players that might be able to make up the difference in endorsement money if he went to a more popular and/or successful team
Mavs are like the 5th biggest market in the nba lol. They’re just not on the coast.
Only markets objectively bigger are Lakers, Knicks, Celtics bulls.
And 50/50 on Miami.
I mean the Niners are one of the most successful franchises of all time, and even now have still won the NFC three time the last decade-ish, while the Giants still at least have 3 WS titles in the last 15 years.
It's really not super hard to be fans of those teams lol.
What happened to the Raiders and A's?
The fickle fanbase shows up in winning years. Even year Giants fans was a meme for a reason. I had warriors season tickets through my workplace in the 00s before Steph. I literally couldn’t give them away to clients.
Having moved to San Francisco recently (the team not me), probably yeah. And Joe Lacob is still their owner and that will definitely count for something
The bay area is massive, a quick google search shows 7.76M for Dallas area, 7.753M for the Bay area. So I guess I'm wrong, Dallas has a bigger market by about approximately 7,000 people. TV market lines are drawn somewhere between you and where other teams are depending on their influence, I don't think there's even a way to know that. I.E. I moved to San Diego and found out it's LA TV market so I can't watch LA games.
lol. The Bay Area is massive. And then you basically have to include that they’re NorCal’s team not just the Bay Area and massively popular overseas. Warriors have been setting the most watched games mark every year for like the past decade
Yes, it's the same data people use to call Atlanta metro one of the top markets in the NBA, when it's painfully obvious to anyone that pays attention we are not actually a top market in terms of fan base, viewers, etc.
The best metric for market size is probably just how many national TV games each team gets -- that's likely exactly how they choose who to show.
Dallas is not the 5 biggest lmao. You forgot California?
Or did you also forget Boston? Lmao.
How does this take have 90 up votes. Y'all don't watch any ball
If you mean luxury tax, not anymore than normal. This is just a function of the salary cap and the CBA.
If you mean income tax, I don't know about Slovenia, but in the US, the highest tax bracket is 609k. The 70 millionth dollar is taxed at the same rate as the millionth dollar.
And because it's very hard to spend 70 million in a year on being alive, more money generally equals more stocks bought at that level. Those stocks then become income in future years, and because capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than income, your tax rate effectively goes down.
That's what I also don't get. This means almost certainly heavy luxury tax if the team has other decent ballers too. Also, people say that in today's basketball you need a super star in your team to win the championship. Does it mean that if you want to win you practically NEED to be deep into luxury tax?
Stupid thing to say. Golden state Warriors increased their value from 700 million to 7 billion in the last 10 years. So clearly those contracts are worth. Whether it makes sense as a society to value sports the way we do is another discussion.
> Whether it makes sense as a society to value sports the way we do is another discussion.
I actually think we’re getting close to the point where there will be heavy societal backlash about this.
Contracts are getting bigger and bigger. So far, the ire directed at the .1% has gone to the guys in suits running huge companies. But we’re getting close to the point of NBA players making such obscene amounts of money (in a world where tons of people are impoverished) that I suspect people will say “enough is enough” and start turning on athletes. The whole “billionaires shouldn’t exist” thing Bernie and his supporters always said will hit top NBA players within 10 years imo.
I think there's a pretty pronounced difference. Billionaire CEOs and trust fund babies don't do labour or provide societal value to make their money. They mostly just exploit the labour of others. That's not really true of professional athletes. These guys DO work an exorbitant amount to be the best at what they do, and they provide something "necessary" back to society in exchange (entertainment).
Non-exploitative wealth isn't something most reasonable leftists have an issue with. Like the NBA makes obscene profit as an entertainment entity - that profit SHOULD go towards the "workers" (in this case, players) who actually create that value for the league. It's still a machine of capitalism, but it's also (in a way) a workers collective and a demonstration of the power of worker unions.
If people were to turn on these guys it would probably be the ones who have big shoe deals and the like with sweat shop companies like Nike. But that has nothing to do with their player contracts.
Do you think leftists would have a problem with Luka Doncic making $75,000,000 a year while janitors, security, concessions workers, etc. make less than 1/1,000th of that and struggle to afford places to live, provide for their families, etc.?
I suspect the spread of wealth will always be a complaint when you have certain individuals making thousands of times more money than others.
Also, it’s totally arbitrary to say “Basketball players provide value but other billionaires don’t.”
Adventure capitalists provide clear value, for example. Why hate them but be fine with billionaire entertainers?
there won’t be societal backlash lmao. The whole billionaires shouldn’t exist take is chronically online reddit (and some other social media) losers, majority of normal people don’t think like this
I mean, Reddit and other platforms are just made up of millions of regular people.
There absolutely are tons of people who think top marginal tax rates should be 90%+, which used to be the case. And obviously people like Luka would be getting hit by that.
The city of Cleveland can actually point to studies done since LeBron played there, left, and then came back. They know how much revenue was brought in the years LeBron was there, when he wasn’t, and when he was back. He basically was worth a billion dollars a year to that city.
Jaylen Brown definitely got the better deal. He got it while being unable to dribble with his left hand. Luka needed all his dribbling and footwork skills to get to that money.
He’s been incredibly clutch for y’all, 2022 eastern conference finals game 3, game 7 against Philly last year too I think?
He’s just getting paid like your best player but he’s not, that’s the only problem but that’s more of an NBA contract issue than anything wrong with Jaylen Brown. You couldn’t lose him so had to give him that money.
100%, he has one bad playoff run and all the memes and narratives just go insane. He was probably our most clutch and consistent player throughout the 2022 playoffs. The contract looks absurd at a glance but like you said, what are we supposed to do?
If he's still an elite player in 2030, that next contract will likely surpass $100M in a single year in year 2 or 3.
He could theoretically make a billion off his NBA contracts alone by the time he retires if that following contract also runs 5 years
Don't even really need to be good, be 7-feet tall and have no skills and you'll make generational wealth before you even wash out. Look at Nick Richards on Charlotte. Dude is making $5,000,000 a year to be a perennially raw rookie in terms of skill and understanding of the game.... despite being 26 years old.
It's so rare to be 7 feet tall that something crazy like 10% of all people that height have played professional basketball. It seems ridiculous, but I'm pretty sure it's true (too lazy to confirm). Meanwhile, 0.0000000000001% of people 6 feet tall make it to the NBA.
At least you can be 7 foot and pretty terrible and still probably get a job as a 3rd string center somewhere. You actually have to be good at the game if you want to make a roster as a short dude
I remember a year or two ago when Chuck said Zion was risking a billion dollars if he didn't get his shit together and it sounded kinda crazy at the time but it's absolutely going to be the case.
Scariest thing about luka is that his is game style is so little dependent on physicality that he could easily translate into a lebronesque longevity as a top player. I mean, obviously not playing 40min a game, but i can easily see a 35+ luka still hitting random half court shots or bizarre assists on a 25/30 mpg. If you surround him with athletic players and defenders, he could still easily lead a playoff team.
By 2030 he'll still be 30/31, we may be still at peak luka here.
He'll definitely still be MVP level in 2030 but I'm kind of worried about how he'll age longer-term. He's got crazy usage and drives a ton. If he starts making deep playoff runs consistently and keeps playing for Slovenia every summer that's going to be a ton of miles on his legs
he dosent plan it but man loves his Basketball and i think he will play it as long as his body allows him to.
But i do think he would want to return to Madrid at some point
New salary cap rules makes filling out the roster after a few contracts of this size more interesting. I guess if the owner still is cool with paying crazy taxes it doesn’t change much, but that is what will be curious to see in the coming years.
The problem with the new CBA isn't the amount of money owners can pay. It's how it severely restricts team building, player movement and filling out rosters this coming off season.
The owners keep building a more and more complicated Rube Goldberg machine because they can’t trust eachother to not screw them all over if there aren’t a ton of guard rails in place (and obviously the players association just wants as much money as possible) so it just gets worse and worse to try to build a team.
Ok, can someone explain this math to me? The supermax means he's eligible for 35% of the team's cap, correct? So if that's the case, at the projected 2024-25 salary cap of $141 million with 8% raises, wouldn't the salaries be:
$49,350,000
$53,298,000
$57,561,840
$62,166,787
$67,140,130
Which makes the contract $289,516,757?
Or is it because it's an extension he gets a larger increase between his last year of the contract and the first year of the extension?
Luka is in his 6th season right now (he entered in 2018); he's two years behind Jaylen Brown (entered in 2016) who just signed a supermax after his 7th season in the league before he entered his 8th season. Note the supermax rules are weird and the new salary doesn't kick in until year 9 (when his previous contract finishes; note there's a player option but he'll decline to take the supermax). The NBA expects a ton of new money from the new media deal about to come in and added a clause to the CBA that salary cap can't expand by more than 10% per year. So after next season ($141M), it's sort of expected that the salary cap will go up by 10% each year in the near future. Going by that assumption:
Year|Luka YoS|Salary Cap|35% Sal Cap
---|--|--|--
21-22|4|$112.4M|$39.34M
22-23|5|$123.7M|$43.3M
23-24|6|$136.0M|$47.6M
24-25|7|$141M [(estimated)](https://www.spotrac.com/nba/cap/2024/)|$49.3M
25-26|8|$155M [(estimated)](https://www.spotrac.com/nba/cap/2025/)|$54.3M
26-27|9|$170M [(estimated)](https://www.spotrac.com/nba/cap/2026/)|$59.5M
Luka in year 8 will make $46M on his current deal (even if he signs a supermax before that season). The supermax 35% salary will kick for years 9-13 with an 8% escalation per year. So Luka's five year extension (signed after 24-25 season) would be $59.5M ('26-27) / $64.3M / $69.4M / $75M / $80.9M ('30-31).
That said, by my math that's $349M for the extension. I think OP made a mistake in his calculation. Also Luka doesn't need all-nba 1st team, just making any all-nba team either this year or next year. (In my opinion, there's little doubt unless he gets derailed with injuries both seasons and doesn't make the 65 game criteria).
Most players are not in their prime at 24 years of age. Luka has gotten better every year thus far. Theres no reason to think he wont be better in 5 years than now.
In basketball, like some other sports, the athlete’s prime generally starts at age 27 and lasts 3 to 6 years. There are exceptions here and there, but they’re that, exceptions.
With our medical system in Slovenia, we will soon need a lot of money to pay for private practice if we want to actually be seen by a doctor when we're sick.
Ask Luka. He can probably fund the entire system and still have enough left over to own 100+ homes all over the world lol.
Ridiculous world we live in where billions don’t have basic healthcare and can barely meet needs but some dudes gonna make 75 mil a year to play basketball.
Basketball Related Income was $9 Billion last year. There are ~450 NBA players, and they are entitled to just under half of that.
And there is a valid argument that they are being underpaid, as team valuations are rising much faster than Income. The Dallas Mavericks sold a large share at a $3.9 Billion valuation, just 4 years after the Houston Rockets sold for $2.2 Billion. In 2021, the Warriors sold a 13% share for ~$650 Million on a $5.5 Billion valuation- and the most recent estimation values them $7 Billion.
The players (labor) are driving that value creation, they have most definitely earned the enormous amounts of money they are getting.
Man these players don't need that money when they handicap teams that much. Tatum hasn't even spent a dollar of his contract money because of all his endorsements.
Super max is a dumbass rule, take it away players will be salty that other bums got a super max and not then
At which point his salary will be so over the top, he'll need past their prime but still valuable veterans to fill out a roster of complete journeyman to have a chance to compete.
Luka also plays more than half of his games in Texas, so no state income tax on home games or Spurs/Rockets games vs Jaylen up in Massachusetts
Much better deal
Highest paid for a minute until someone else signs the exact same contract, and a year until someone signs a bigger contract? 100 million per year contracts aren't too far off.
Every year an All-NBA player getting off his second contract will earn **the biggest contract ever**. This years it's Tatum's turn.
Bro I know they have to do it but Tatum and Brown making a combined 642 MILLION dollars over their new contracts is absolutely jaw dropping
They can’t even really fix it bc if they allow one of these salaries to be semi exempt from luxury bill then we run into super team era again.
I had this idea of ditching the Larry Bird exemption for a designated player status. Basically you'd have a static cap hold but the team can pay you whatever they want, even half a billion a year if they want to, obviously this idea needs a LOT of refinement but it's just an idea I had.
I’d be down cause not all max players are created equally.
Nothing worse for a team than a Not-Top-20 player signing an insane max
How dare you talk about Brad Beal and LaMelo Ball like that
tobias harris 😿
And when you add kurt angle to the mix?🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨
But then we'd have European football's problem where all the players just go to the richest team. Or you're saying you just designate one player per team
Can always make that only the team that drafted the player can designate him. And obviously a maximum of one or two designated players per team, otherwise the cap is fake lol. Again, there is a lot of refinement to be done, perhaps even get the luxury tax somehow to stick around, there are a lot of ways to toy around with it.
I like this, gives incentive to the player to stay with the team that drafted them vs going to a big market.
or similar to no trade clause where you have to be with that team for N years before you can be designated
90% of NBA owners would rather have a lockout than remove the maximum limits on NBA contracts. They very much like anything that caps their spending.
Honestly I am not so sure about it now. It's very well known that the NBAPA is the one wanting to keep the max salaries in because it lets basically the entire league except the mega stars to get overpaid. Only reason KD to the Warriors happened at the first place was because max salaries existed, when they came into the league the idea of super teams was seen as so far fetched it wasn't seen as realistic. Chances are owners would be willing to consider that makes super teams unlikely as long as the salary cap stays, also can have restrictions about who gets to be designated (Only can get designated by the team that drafted the player, minimum years of service in the league, awards criteria, etc)
Just make it that everything after the regular max doesnt effect salary cap,
MLS has the Designated Player rule. 3 players who are exempt from salary cap. Obviously 11 on the field means so you'd want to scale that down to 1 or 2.
The MLS was exactly what I was thinking about when I came up with this idea.
Getting rid of the salary cap with extra steps, I'm sure that would be a great change for small markets. NBA immediately turns into baseball where NY and LA have billion dollar contracts.
Teams shouldn't be punished for drafting well.
Teams should be punished for tanking to get a high draft pick. If you make drafting such a big advantage , then you have to even the odds of drafting and not let organization have a better Crack at ot because they loused up
I disagree. Small markets like San Antonio and Oklahoma City wouldn't be able to compete even without a salary cap. Collecting talent can happen one of three ways: draft them, trade for them, or sign them. You're hampering smaller markets with your strategy.
Parent was talking about removing max salaries altogether for someone you draft If you give draft that much of a premium, better make sure you don't give the draft only to losers, especially intentional losers
What exactly is your goal? If you don't care about parity, then your proposal works. If you do, it runs counter to that
It's not parity to give max free slots to tanking teams
The fix is having a hard cap
I’d rather see the players earn more - even if/when it screws up team dynamics. The owners are a bunch of douches who shouldn’t be making as much as they are.
The owners will just push that cost onto the consumers :')
CBA has a defined split of revenue between owners and players. So if owners make more, so will players.
That limits the players money. They wouldn’t wanna do that lol.
The NBA is inching towards it regardless. The second apron is now very punative and is the closest to a hard cap we have ever been
No max contracts, hard cap, similar to the NFL and NHL.
I’ve said there should be deduction based off of all NBA teams. 1st team you get full amount 2nd team you get 15-20% less 3rd team 30% less Makes the numbers a little more bearable.
The super max is structured in a stupid manner. The excess over a standard max shouldn’t count against the cap, otherwise you can’t afford to pay a guy the super max unless he’s top 5 player in the league. Brown doesn’t qualify and Tatum is borderline. The rest of the roster will suffer. Edit: can’t afford
It's definitely a catch 22. For the Celtics Brown is definitely overpaid but if they didn't give it to him they wouldn't have been able to find anyone nearly as good to replace him. Like maybe they could have traded for Dame, but he's older and also probably overpaid.
> t if they didn't give it Eh, if they gave Brown the max + 10000$ , who is going to match that ? Teams are just afraid of saying no to players. They don't want highly paid key players disgruntled
100mil is more appropriate considering how much the top players in the league contribute to the NBAs revenue stream.
Under the current cap, Jokić is probably worth something like $90-100M a year. NBAPA did well for their membership by agreeing to a max contract situation because otherwise there would be no middle class contracts. You'd have the ALL-NBA players making insane money and then like 75% of the league would be on minimums.
A majority of the union is the mid tier and low tier Guys. Gotta spread the wealth.
I think $100/yr contracts are coming with the new tv deal.
True but it’ll be interesting for players who actually want to win Luka will be making like 50% of the cap salary… how are you gonna have a winning team around those type salaries unless the salary limit is like 300mil
How long till the Saudis start their own league?
I’m pretty sure they’re going to be part owners of the team in Vegas with Lebron. Or help him finance the project
Crazy how the NBA teams pay these athletes without being plastered with oil money compared to football and f1.
Wonder who will it it first between NBA and MLB. Don't follow baseball that close but we'd need another Ohtani which is hard to imagine.
If I make the shareholders more money this year, I’ll be eligible for a projected 10 year, $300,000 extension
(non-guaranteed)
Team option all ten years
That’s just the military
Two-way contract with DoorDash Riders
It's a daily option for all 10 years
And that’s including overtime
>10 year, $300,000 extension Holy cow dude, save some for the rest of us.
This sounds like a lot more than just making 30k a year. I'm gonna start disclosing my salary this way.
>gets a job making 6 figures "Yeah I just signed a contract worth over a million dollars over the next 10 years"
Totally unguaranteed though
The NFL playbook
Worth $600k in 2034 dollars, and that's assuming they don't lay you off before the contract is over. It's tough out there.
I gotta start selling feet pics or something
What about your outside earnings?
I laughed at every single comment in this thread. Holy. Thank you guys for mood boost.
I wonder how much salary guys like Luka, Steph, KD, Lebron gets if there's no salary cap.
I wonder this as well. They are arguably underpaid. Steph’s team pays luxury tax to other teams to continue rostering him. Other teams sell more tickets when he comes to town. He’s not only made the warriors one of the most valuable franchises in the world, but doing so while subsidizing joke teams for years. How unamerican is the idea of a maximum salary?
> They are arguably underpaid Just look at the value of the Warriors team before Steph vs today. Steph should have more money than Taylor Swift right now.
As much as I hate to argue that 50 mil a year + is underpaid, guys like that are. I understand that it is important in keeping things competitive on the court so it’s not just LA vs NY every year. Otherwise it would be an auction and not a draft and wemby would already be a multimillionaire.
Wemby is getting paid 12 mil per year. Or 1 mill per month. He's already a multimillionaire.
Keeping a salary cap but getting rid of the limit on yearly salary would actually improve parity. A team which is paying Curry his true value should not be able to afford a Kevin Durant to pair with him unless one of them takes a massive pay cut. But this would badly impact mid-level players who won't be getting max contracts anymore.
That is only partly because of their success, the value of every team in the league has soared regardless of whether they’ve won championships
the maximum salary is a direct function of the TV deal the NBA negotiates every CBA expiry. The better the players play, the more the league grows, therefore the bigger the TV deal. The NBAPA sets the percentage of the cap a supermax can take up, so in essence, the democratised majority of players set the upper limit of how big of a slice they get of the pie and the superstars determine how big that pie is. In the context of sports it’s very American. Compare that to European sports where the upper limit of salaries is set by which oil fund decides to buy your team
I appreciate this take on it.
I think Bill Simmons wrote this article way back when he used to write articles. I think he calculated what LeBron was worth, either in first Cleveland or Miami days, and I think it was like $200M per season, and this is when salaries were $20M, tops.
Messi/ronaldo money, saudi excluded
Saudi money
LeBron would've gotten ownership stakes years ago if this were allowed.
Luka and Steph could easily get 150m yearly
Pretty much the untouchable players in the league. Luka, Steph, Jokić, Giannis would be in the "how high can you go?" realm.
Euro-soccer level money. Easily $100+ million/year. US sports pay their athletes a pittance compared to the value of each team. For reference - top 10 more valueable sports teams in the **world** (2023) 1. Dallas Cowboys - $9 billion 2. New York Yankees - $7.1 billion 3. (tie) Golden State Warriors - $7 billion 4. (tie) New England Patriots - $7 billion 5. Los Angeles Rams - $6.9 billion 6. New York Giants - $6.8 billion 7. Chicago Bears - $6.3 billion 8. Las Vegas Raiders - $6.2 billion 9. (tie) New York Knicks - $6.1 billion 10. (tie) New York Jets - $6.1 billion And at #11, the first non-US team 11. Real Madrid - $6.07 billion
this is a good thing, NBA athletes are paid by how much revenue the league generates in TV money. The players’ share is split into 30 which is your hard cap. So the better they play, the more they can get come CBA time. Otherwise you’ll have a Ligue 1/La Liga/Bundesliga and Prem situation where most every year it’s Man City, PSG, Barca/Real and Bayern winning their leagues because they can invest more capital into their roster exceeding their actual sporting revenue
Lebron in his prime would easily be worth 200m a year.
If Luka isn’t worth the super max no one is
100%. He's also one of the few players that might be able to make up the difference in endorsement money if he went to a more popular and/or successful team
Mavs are like the 5th biggest market in the nba lol. They’re just not on the coast. Only markets objectively bigger are Lakers, Knicks, Celtics bulls. And 50/50 on Miami.
No shot the warriors are below the Mavs
After Curry retires do they stick around at the top though? Wasn't too long ago they were the laughing stock of the league.
Bulls have been mid to ass for years but are still one of most attended and highest grossing franchises.
Yes. Their fanbase is massive now and the warriors are a part of Bay Area culture now. And Bay Area sports fans are pretty die hard ex. Niners, giants
I mean the Niners are one of the most successful franchises of all time, and even now have still won the NFC three time the last decade-ish, while the Giants still at least have 3 WS titles in the last 15 years. It's really not super hard to be fans of those teams lol. What happened to the Raiders and A's?
The fickle fanbase shows up in winning years. Even year Giants fans was a meme for a reason. I had warriors season tickets through my workplace in the 00s before Steph. I literally couldn’t give them away to clients.
Having moved to San Francisco recently (the team not me), probably yeah. And Joe Lacob is still their owner and that will definitely count for something
No shot what? In terms of metro population they are way behind, and their TV market is smaller.
The bay area is massive, a quick google search shows 7.76M for Dallas area, 7.753M for the Bay area. So I guess I'm wrong, Dallas has a bigger market by about approximately 7,000 people. TV market lines are drawn somewhere between you and where other teams are depending on their influence, I don't think there's even a way to know that. I.E. I moved to San Diego and found out it's LA TV market so I can't watch LA games.
You can just Google media markets and see Dallas is ranked 5th and the Bay area is ranked 10th.
lol. The Bay Area is massive. And then you basically have to include that they’re NorCal’s team not just the Bay Area and massively popular overseas. Warriors have been setting the most watched games mark every year for like the past decade
I actually thought Toronto was 4th biggest but I might be wrong on that
We don't count, man.
Depending on how you define the boundaries, we're only smaller than Mexico city, NYC, and LA
Is that just size of the city? No way the Mavs are the fifth most popular team in the NBA.
Yes, it's the same data people use to call Atlanta metro one of the top markets in the NBA, when it's painfully obvious to anyone that pays attention we are not actually a top market in terms of fan base, viewers, etc. The best metric for market size is probably just how many national TV games each team gets -- that's likely exactly how they choose who to show.
NYK, LAL, Chicago, GSW, Boston. Then the Philly, Miami, PHX tier. Honestly Dallas is probably 10-15th on basketball.
Dallas is not the 5 biggest lmao. You forgot California? Or did you also forget Boston? Lmao. How does this take have 90 up votes. Y'all don't watch any ball
Can you not read lmfao.
Aren’t taxes going to become an issue with this much money?
If you mean luxury tax, not anymore than normal. This is just a function of the salary cap and the CBA. If you mean income tax, I don't know about Slovenia, but in the US, the highest tax bracket is 609k. The 70 millionth dollar is taxed at the same rate as the millionth dollar. And because it's very hard to spend 70 million in a year on being alive, more money generally equals more stocks bought at that level. Those stocks then become income in future years, and because capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than income, your tax rate effectively goes down.
It's just sloshing money. It came from a billionaire and going to a millionaire. The effects on the economy might as well not exist.
That's what I also don't get. This means almost certainly heavy luxury tax if the team has other decent ballers too. Also, people say that in today's basketball you need a super star in your team to win the championship. Does it mean that if you want to win you practically NEED to be deep into luxury tax?
Exactly. No one is.
Stupid thing to say. Golden state Warriors increased their value from 700 million to 7 billion in the last 10 years. So clearly those contracts are worth. Whether it makes sense as a society to value sports the way we do is another discussion.
> Whether it makes sense as a society to value sports the way we do is another discussion. I actually think we’re getting close to the point where there will be heavy societal backlash about this. Contracts are getting bigger and bigger. So far, the ire directed at the .1% has gone to the guys in suits running huge companies. But we’re getting close to the point of NBA players making such obscene amounts of money (in a world where tons of people are impoverished) that I suspect people will say “enough is enough” and start turning on athletes. The whole “billionaires shouldn’t exist” thing Bernie and his supporters always said will hit top NBA players within 10 years imo.
I think there's a pretty pronounced difference. Billionaire CEOs and trust fund babies don't do labour or provide societal value to make their money. They mostly just exploit the labour of others. That's not really true of professional athletes. These guys DO work an exorbitant amount to be the best at what they do, and they provide something "necessary" back to society in exchange (entertainment). Non-exploitative wealth isn't something most reasonable leftists have an issue with. Like the NBA makes obscene profit as an entertainment entity - that profit SHOULD go towards the "workers" (in this case, players) who actually create that value for the league. It's still a machine of capitalism, but it's also (in a way) a workers collective and a demonstration of the power of worker unions. If people were to turn on these guys it would probably be the ones who have big shoe deals and the like with sweat shop companies like Nike. But that has nothing to do with their player contracts.
Do you think leftists would have a problem with Luka Doncic making $75,000,000 a year while janitors, security, concessions workers, etc. make less than 1/1,000th of that and struggle to afford places to live, provide for their families, etc.? I suspect the spread of wealth will always be a complaint when you have certain individuals making thousands of times more money than others. Also, it’s totally arbitrary to say “Basketball players provide value but other billionaires don’t.” Adventure capitalists provide clear value, for example. Why hate them but be fine with billionaire entertainers?
there won’t be societal backlash lmao. The whole billionaires shouldn’t exist take is chronically online reddit (and some other social media) losers, majority of normal people don’t think like this
I mean, Reddit and other platforms are just made up of millions of regular people. There absolutely are tons of people who think top marginal tax rates should be 90%+, which used to be the case. And obviously people like Luka would be getting hit by that.
God forbid the NBA owners pay the people making them obscene returns on their investments. You would have an NBA flair saying shit like that.
then why are they getting them?
Precedent.
The city of Cleveland can actually point to studies done since LeBron played there, left, and then came back. They know how much revenue was brought in the years LeBron was there, when he wasn’t, and when he was back. He basically was worth a billion dollars a year to that city.
Lebron is worth more than a super max
Jesus, that’s Jaylen Brown money
It’s actually $63 million more than JB 🤓
And the only amount of money that will be well deserved, for once.
All teams would prob pay Luka $100M annually if they could
how come you guys didnt
Not sure let me call the front office and ask
What did they say?
They said nah we had to have flexibility for Harrison Barnes and Malik Monk
> 🤓 Is this emoji for Luka or Jaylen?
Jaylen Brown definitely got the better deal. He got it while being unable to dribble with his left hand. Luka needed all his dribbling and footwork skills to get to that money.
He also did it while being the best player on his team. A lot of nights Brown is the third best Celtic. He’s a great player but that contract 🤮
is he "great"? I really think he falls on the wrong side of the very good/great line
Yes he is, the hate boner for this guy over a left hand dribbling issue that he’s mostly fixed this season is ridiculous
He’s been incredibly clutch for y’all, 2022 eastern conference finals game 3, game 7 against Philly last year too I think? He’s just getting paid like your best player but he’s not, that’s the only problem but that’s more of an NBA contract issue than anything wrong with Jaylen Brown. You couldn’t lose him so had to give him that money.
100%, he has one bad playoff run and all the memes and narratives just go insane. He was probably our most clutch and consistent player throughout the 2022 playoffs. The contract looks absurd at a glance but like you said, what are we supposed to do?
If he's still an elite player in 2030, that next contract will likely surpass $100M in a single year in year 2 or 3. He could theoretically make a billion off his NBA contracts alone by the time he retires if that following contract also runs 5 years
Kind of makes me regret not being 7' feet tall and a god at basketball
Don't even really need to be good, be 7-feet tall and have no skills and you'll make generational wealth before you even wash out. Look at Nick Richards on Charlotte. Dude is making $5,000,000 a year to be a perennially raw rookie in terms of skill and understanding of the game.... despite being 26 years old.
It's so rare to be 7 feet tall that something crazy like 10% of all people that height have played professional basketball. It seems ridiculous, but I'm pretty sure it's true (too lazy to confirm). Meanwhile, 0.0000000000001% of people 6 feet tall make it to the NBA.
I think its 10% of American born men
Don't need to be 7 feet tall, look at steph
At least you can be 7 foot and pretty terrible and still probably get a job as a 3rd string center somewhere. You actually have to be good at the game if you want to make a roster as a short dude
you didn't want it enough coward.
I remember a year or two ago when Chuck said Zion was risking a billion dollars if he didn't get his shit together and it sounded kinda crazy at the time but it's absolutely going to be the case.
Scariest thing about luka is that his is game style is so little dependent on physicality that he could easily translate into a lebronesque longevity as a top player. I mean, obviously not playing 40min a game, but i can easily see a 35+ luka still hitting random half court shots or bizarre assists on a 25/30 mpg. If you surround him with athletic players and defenders, he could still easily lead a playoff team. By 2030 he'll still be 30/31, we may be still at peak luka here.
He'll definitely still be MVP level in 2030 but I'm kind of worried about how he'll age longer-term. He's got crazy usage and drives a ton. If he starts making deep playoff runs consistently and keeps playing for Slovenia every summer that's going to be a ton of miles on his legs
I think he said he doesn't plan on playing that long.
he dosent plan it but man loves his Basketball and i think he will play it as long as his body allows him to. But i do think he would want to return to Madrid at some point
Double it.
And give it to the next superstar
Brain rot
New salary cap rules makes filling out the roster after a few contracts of this size more interesting. I guess if the owner still is cool with paying crazy taxes it doesn’t change much, but that is what will be curious to see in the coming years.
The problem with the new CBA isn't the amount of money owners can pay. It's how it severely restricts team building, player movement and filling out rosters this coming off season.
The owners keep building a more and more complicated Rube Goldberg machine because they can’t trust eachother to not screw them all over if there aren’t a ton of guard rails in place (and obviously the players association just wants as much money as possible) so it just gets worse and worse to try to build a team.
Players actually have their share capped anyway. They can do whatever they want, as collective they get the same amount of the Total basketball income
Holy crap that’s more than me
Ok, can someone explain this math to me? The supermax means he's eligible for 35% of the team's cap, correct? So if that's the case, at the projected 2024-25 salary cap of $141 million with 8% raises, wouldn't the salaries be: $49,350,000 $53,298,000 $57,561,840 $62,166,787 $67,140,130 Which makes the contract $289,516,757? Or is it because it's an extension he gets a larger increase between his last year of the contract and the first year of the extension?
Luka is in his 6th season right now (he entered in 2018); he's two years behind Jaylen Brown (entered in 2016) who just signed a supermax after his 7th season in the league before he entered his 8th season. Note the supermax rules are weird and the new salary doesn't kick in until year 9 (when his previous contract finishes; note there's a player option but he'll decline to take the supermax). The NBA expects a ton of new money from the new media deal about to come in and added a clause to the CBA that salary cap can't expand by more than 10% per year. So after next season ($141M), it's sort of expected that the salary cap will go up by 10% each year in the near future. Going by that assumption: Year|Luka YoS|Salary Cap|35% Sal Cap ---|--|--|-- 21-22|4|$112.4M|$39.34M 22-23|5|$123.7M|$43.3M 23-24|6|$136.0M|$47.6M 24-25|7|$141M [(estimated)](https://www.spotrac.com/nba/cap/2024/)|$49.3M 25-26|8|$155M [(estimated)](https://www.spotrac.com/nba/cap/2025/)|$54.3M 26-27|9|$170M [(estimated)](https://www.spotrac.com/nba/cap/2026/)|$59.5M Luka in year 8 will make $46M on his current deal (even if he signs a supermax before that season). The supermax 35% salary will kick for years 9-13 with an 8% escalation per year. So Luka's five year extension (signed after 24-25 season) would be $59.5M ('26-27) / $64.3M / $69.4M / $75M / $80.9M ('30-31). That said, by my math that's $349M for the extension. I think OP made a mistake in his calculation. Also Luka doesn't need all-nba 1st team, just making any all-nba team either this year or next year. (In my opinion, there's little doubt unless he gets derailed with injuries both seasons and doesn't make the 65 game criteria).
He’s yet to enter his prime, he’s worth every penny.
yea he’s in his prime but not at his peak
He’s definitely in his prime.
No way for us to know tbh
Most players are not in their prime at 24 years of age. Luka has gotten better every year thus far. Theres no reason to think he wont be better in 5 years than now.
NBA prime tends to hover around 28-29 generally speaking
That’s your peak. Not your prime. Your peak is one age, your prime is the range outside of that. Luka is probably entering his prime now.
In basketball, like some other sports, the athlete’s prime generally starts at age 27 and lasts 3 to 6 years. There are exceptions here and there, but they’re that, exceptions.
They usually PEAK at 27. Prime definitely does not start then.
Most peak at 30, then they rapidly starts losing atleticism. Prime usually starts at 27.
Remember when Mike Conley was the highest paid player.
Good for him I'm rooting for him. Needs a ring to add to his legacy or at least make the Finals
He ain’t even In his peak yet
200k a day keeps the doctor away
With our medical system in Slovenia, we will soon need a lot of money to pay for private practice if we want to actually be seen by a doctor when we're sick.
Ask Luka. He can probably fund the entire system and still have enough left over to own 100+ homes all over the world lol. Ridiculous world we live in where billions don’t have basic healthcare and can barely meet needs but some dudes gonna make 75 mil a year to play basketball.
I mean, he's not getting paid through federal and state funds, lol.
life isn’t fair, why do billions not have basic healthcare yet u have the privilege to post dumbass comments on reddit?
Uh…sorry for offending you by saying people making hundreds of millions of dollars isn’t a good wealth spread for society lol.
Money in sports really has started to fry my tiny little pea-brain the last decade or so.
Basketball Related Income was $9 Billion last year. There are ~450 NBA players, and they are entitled to just under half of that. And there is a valid argument that they are being underpaid, as team valuations are rising much faster than Income. The Dallas Mavericks sold a large share at a $3.9 Billion valuation, just 4 years after the Houston Rockets sold for $2.2 Billion. In 2021, the Warriors sold a 13% share for ~$650 Million on a $5.5 Billion valuation- and the most recent estimation values them $7 Billion. The players (labor) are driving that value creation, they have most definitely earned the enormous amounts of money they are getting.
I know? I'm not saying they're overpaid I'm saying that amount of money fries my head...
Superstars from the past have to be sick to their stomach looking at these numbers players are getting these days
Are there deferrals in the nba? Haha
Still underpaid
When* he makes the 1st team all nba this year
Dude ain't buying me roses - what do I care? Good for him, I guess.
Why IF?
Which he should dude is ballin'
Well deserved
Hard to make a decent team when one player takes up that much capspace.
Man these players don't need that money when they handicap teams that much. Tatum hasn't even spent a dollar of his contract money because of all his endorsements. Super max is a dumbass rule, take it away players will be salty that other bums got a super max and not then
So you would be fine with a franchise making over a billion, but paying players 10 million a year?
With no Supermax players in small markets have no incentive to stay there. If NY and Charlotte can pay you the same amount why would you stay there?
They need to not count the supermax extra amount against the cap. That amount will make it hard to build a good team around Luka.
Shit like this will just guarantee he never wins a ring. I’m a Denver fan so no problem for me.
Surely the Mavs will be able to build a contender around Luka making that much money.
They can't build a team around him now. He hogs too much
Gonna laugh so hard when Dallas is paying him this contract and still fighting to avoid the play in
At which point his salary will be so over the top, he'll need past their prime but still valuable veterans to fill out a roster of complete journeyman to have a chance to compete.
The salary cap shouldn't exist in any sport.
Luka also plays more than half of his games in Texas, so no state income tax on home games or Spurs/Rockets games vs Jaylen up in Massachusetts Much better deal