Last year, Forbes reported that the average NBA team was worth $3.85 billion, and it’s set to increase a whopping 35% after the NBA signs its new media deal in the coming year. This rise in popularity seems unprecedented, as the likes of Anthony Edwards and Shai-Gilgeious Alexander are taking the sport to new heights. Considering that salaries and team valuations have sharply risen, sports analysts Charles Barkley and Shannon Sharpe believe that the day isn’t far when players make upwards of $80 million a year.
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For context, the highest-paid player is Stephen Curry, the 4-time champion, who recently signed a 4-year, $215 million contract extension with the Warriors. But the current numbers are so dumbfounding that an “old head” like Barkley can’t make much sense of it.
Appearing on Shannon Sharpe’s show, ‘Club Shay Shay’, the 61-year-old recalled the time he first heard of a player making a million dollars a year,
“I remember vividly me, Doc, Moses, Bobbie Jones, and Andrew Tony. We were in the locker room one day, and it broke that Magic Johnson had been the first NBA player to make a million dollars…We were walking around, high-fiving each other. We could not believe an NBA player made a million dollars.”
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In the early 80s, it was truly unheard of for a basketball player to make a million dollars a year, and that too for a second-year player. Magic Johnson was different, though. The rookie out of UCLA was ‘show time’ from the start, as he led the Lakers to the 1980 championship as a rookie.
Dr. Buss knew what he was witnessing and offered Magic a league-altering contract that saw the Laker legend making a million a year for the next 25 years. The contract, signed in 1981, didn’t take effect until 1984, as Magic still had three years left on his rookie deal.
Fast forward to present times, and Barkley thinks that in a matter of four or five years, players like Luka Doncic will be leading the salary tables, as the TNT analyst predicted that players will make upwards of $80 or $90 million, a figure the league is far from, at present.
NBA salaries have seen a major rise within just a year
Charles Barkley seems to be spot-on with his analysis. The last two years have been the most lucrative in terms of salaries, in the NBA. Looking back, throughout the 1990s, it mostly remained the same, as the median salary in 1990 was $650,000. However, by the time the 2000s rolled around, it went to $1,540,000, which isn’t a significant bump, owing to inflation and the fact that Jordan had won six championships in that time frame, a period many call the “Golden Era” of basketball.
Now, if you thought the 1990s were bad, the statistics for the 2000s will leave you dumbfounded, as the decade only saw a 20% bump in the average salary. The same story continues through the 2010s as well. The story for 2020 is wildly different, though.
The first significant bump came last year, as the league nearly broke the $4 million mark in average salaries. This year, that number is over $10 million, a whopping $6 million difference in just a year. Looking at the current state of the playoffs, where the younger stars have taken over, imagine what the salaries will look like in five years. Maybe Barkley was being modest because, from the looks of things, the $100 million mark is definitely achievable.
