![]() Surprisingly, he only made about 1/10 of Jordan’s salary. We remember him playing, and we remember him as a peer to a player like Michael Jordan. This one comes as an extra shock because Magic Johnson is still fresh in a lot of our minds. Still, if someone broke his record for scoring over 100 points in a game today, they would see a lot more than $1.7m per season. Wilt Chamberlain – $250,000 ($1.7m today)Īrguably the first true basketball superstar, Wilt Chamberlain broke salary records for his time with a five-year contract worth $250,000/year between 19. Bill Russell – $100k ($600k today)ĭespite winning eleven NBA championships with the Boston Celtics between 19, going to the All-Star game twelve times, and being named league MVP five times, Bill Russel hardly cracked half a million dollars at his peak. It doesn’t take account of sponsorship or endorsements, which also only came into effect over time, just the money they made from playing basketball. In each case, we isolated the highest salary that each player received in one season and adjusted it to 2016 US Dollars. Here’s a list of salaries from smallest to largest. ![]() Legendary players from the 60s and 70s like Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell hardly made enough to write home about, by today’s standards, and more recent superstars like Magic Johnson and Larry Bird were shockingly underpaid relative to the place they hold in our memories. Worth just under $50m in today’s dollars, it remains the highest annual salary for an NBA player by a long shot.īut not all of the greats did so well. ![]() It was Michael Jordan who pushed the NBA to soaring heights with his $30m contract with the Chicago Bulls for the 1996-97 season, followed by a $33m contract the following season. ![]() For some broad perspective, Babe Ruth, arguably the greatest American sports icon of all time, peaked at $80,000 per year or $1.1m today. It might seem commonplace now, but NBA salaries for top talent are higher now than ever before, even when inflation is taken into account.Īs we explained in another post, “ When Did Athletes Start Getting Rich?,” professional athletes were considered disposable commodities well into the 1960s and only broke $1m per year at the end of the 1970s. It’s a sign that NBA salaries will only continue to skyrocket in coming years, and more importantly, that teams are betting more than ever on superstar players to carry them to victory. That’s a big leap over other big contracts in recent years, like LeBron James’s $110m deal with the Miami Heat in 2010 and Kobe Bryant’s $136m contract with the LA Lakers in 2004 – both of which were spread across more years. Anthony Davis just signed the biggest NBA contract of all time with the New Orleans Pelicans, worth $145m over five years. ![]()
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