NBA salaries keep going up. Prepare to have your mind blown soon (2024)

When Jaylen Brown’s contract landed across the newsdesk — OK, on your phone — last week, it came with a bit of popping sound. You probably heard it. That was the sound of your brain malfunctioning for a bit after taking note of the size of the deal. Jaylen Brown, a very, very good NBA player but certainly not a megastar, just agreed to a contract that could be worth as much as $304 million.

The first reaction for many people was — and I’m paraphrasing — “Holy crap, that’s a lot of money!”

Dear reader, you are correct. By any objective measure, $300 million — and let’s just call it an even $300 million and not the full amount listed above for reasons we can get into below — is a lot of money. It’s just math. It’s not enough money to, say, buy your favorite social media company just for funsies and run it into ground and still have walkaround cash left over, but it’s enough to buy you most things.

And in a few years, there will be a lot more money. Like, way more. Prepare to have your brain pop and break a few more times this decade. We are only at the beginning of the NBA’s great gold rush.

It is a reflection of the great financial state the league finds itself in, its layoffs notwithstanding. The players benefit from that. Because of the collective bargaining agreement, they make between 49 percent and 51 percent of basketball related income every season, so when the league makes a lot of money, so do its players. NBA salaries at the highest end are going to only go up from here, and they will go very high.

Take Brown’s contract. If the league has a 10 percent increase in the salary cap for the 2024-25 season, he will make $304 million during the course of his five-year contract. That would make it the 13th-largest contract agreed to by a player in major U.S. pro sports. The rest came from the NFL and MLB. But here is the caveat: All 12 of those other deals were at least nine years in length. Brown will get that money in five; then he can hit free agency and do it again.

Maybe this isn’t a surprise to you if you’ve followed closely. There is so much money sloshing around the league that even Scrooge McDuck is at risk of drowning. A player drafted last year could make more than a billion dollars over his career in just NBA contracts alone. Contracts have increased so much that it is no longer useful to talk about them in raw numbers but rather by percentage of the cap.

Still, it’s worth the time to talk through it to get prepared for how much money is still to come.

Let’s start with the salary cap, which is a reflection of the league’s revenues. It has more than doubled in a decade. It was $63.065 million in 2014-15, and it will be $136.021 million this season. That means the top salaries have grown accordingly. The very top contract any player can sign in any given season is worth 35 percent of the cap in the first year of that deal, with 8 percent raises thereafter. If the cap goes up by 10 percent for the 2024-25 contract, Brown will make $52.37 million in the first year, with a raise of 8 percent in each subsequent season.

The new CBA stipulates a maximum 10 percent jump in the salary cap each season. That’s to avoid the kind of gigantic cap spike the NBA saw in 2016. That happened because the league had a new media rights deal kick in that year and didn’t smooth in the big influx of new revenue. This time around, the NBA and the NBPA wanted to avoid that kind of hiccup.

Let’s assume the cap goes up by 10 percent every season from here until the end of the current CBA, which runs through the end of the 2029-30 season. Here is what the cap would be projected to be in each of those seasons and what the first year’s salary of a new supermax contract would be:

Under the 10 percent cap jump projections, if an NBA player signs the 35 percent supermax contract and it kicks in during the 2029-30 season, he will make $84.34 million that year.

And that’s just the first year of that contract. Every subsequent season would come with a raise of 8 percent of the first year’s salary. In other words: Get ready for the $100 million annual salary.

Here’s what that contract, which begins with the 2029-30 season, would look like. In all, it would be a five-year deal worth north of $489 million. The largest contract currently signed by a U.S. athlete is the 10-year, $477 million deal signed by Patrick Mahomes.

But we have to do some cautioning. There is no assurance the salary cap will rise that quickly and that high by 2029. While there was a 10 percent jump this season, next year’s cap is currently projected to be $142 million — just a 4.4 percent increase from the 2023-24 season.

If the cap is at $142 million next season, then Brown’s contract would start at $49.7 million in Year 1, end with $65.6 million in the final season and be worth $288.26 million in all.

It may be possible the NBA could have the cap grow by less than 10 percent for next season then hit the max 10 percent in every year after once its new media rights deal begins with the 2025-26 season. That media rights deal is expected to be a windfall for the NBA, with some estimates that it could more than double the league’s current deal.

The rise in NBA player salaries is staggering, even compared to historical peers. Top NBA player salaries have grown by orders of magnitude above inflation. Compare what some of the league’s highest-paid players were making, adjusted for inflation, to what top players are making today.

Aside from Michael Jordan’s boffo salaries at the end of his Bulls tenure, the top salaries of yesteryear didn’t measure up to what NBA players are earning now. And it’s only going to keep going up.

(Photo of Jaylen Brown: Brian Fluharty / USA Today)