This average salary is very high compared to the standard level in all American sports leagues. To learn more about salaries and the list of NBA players who are paid the highest and lowest, read on with Scott Fujita. NBA centers earned an average of $7.82 in 2021, down 15 percent from the previous season. Teams that have wiggle room or have access to the mid-level exception for non-taxpayers have a little more flexibility to sign players for longer-term minimum wage contracts. However, teams with no cap and no other exceptions can still use the minimum wage exception to add as many players as squad limits and the strict cap for contracts of up to two years allow. Unlike other exceptions, such as the semi-annual or semi-annual exemption, the minimum wage exemption can be used multiple times. Nigerian players earned 12%, while Spanish players earned an average of 11.7% of the salary cap. Over the past 5 seasons, the average salary has been less than 50% of the average NBA salary. An NBA team that has exhausted all of its cap space and has none of its semi-annual exemptions available still has the option to sign a player for minimum wage, unless that club is close to reaching its strict cap. 13 Spanish-born NBA players have an average income of $7.95 million, making them the highest-paid NBA players by country. Average growth fell to 3% from 2002 to 2012 and increased to 7% from 2012 to 2022.

NBA player salaries peak at age 33, averaging 12.1% of the salary cap. From 2001 to 2010, the median salary was 62% of the average, from 2011 to 2022 it fell to 55%. The average salary for an NBA point guard for the 2020-21 season is $11.01 million. This is the highest-paid position in the league for the second consecutive season. This is the smallest annual salary increase among the 5 positions and the lowest 5-year average growth in the league. Adjusted for the 1991 dollar value, the average NBA salary for the 2020-21 season was $3.99 million. This is an increase of 1% compared to the previous season. How much do NBA players earn? According to Basketball Reference, the average player salary for the 2020-2021 season is $7.5 million. The highest-paid player in the NBA is Golden State Warriors point guard Stephen Curry, who pocketed $45 million this year. Paul George will make money for the Clippers this season without 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. The #1 pick in the NBA draft usually receives the largest contract of any player drafted each year.

Cade Cunningham was selected first overall by the Detroit Pistons in the 2021 NBA Draft. He signed a 4-year contract with the team that guaranteed him $45,599,089. This equates to an average annual salary of $11,399,772. During the 2021-22 season, Cunningham had a base salary of $10,050,120, which increased to $10,552,800 for the 2022-23 season. For example, DeAndre Jordan, who has 14 seasons of NBA experience, reportedly signed a one-year contract with the Nuggets, who are only charged $1,836,090 for Jordan`s contract. He will earn $2,905,851, but the NBA will make up the difference. This only applies to one-year contracts and not to multi-year contracts. Fifth on the list is reigning NBA champion Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Greek power forward who led the Bucks` brilliant return to the Phoenix Suns in the NBA Finals after losing two games to none in the best-of-seven series. Antetokounmpo signed a five-year, $228 million contract extension in 2020. For this analysis, I used data from basketball-reference.com.

Salary data is not officially reported by the NBA, so these numbers may not be 100% accurate, but they should be close enough to give a very good idea of how NBA salaries are going. To clean up the data, I removed 10-day players and two-way contracts and only reviewed players who earn at least the corresponding minimum wage. From 1991 to 2009, the average salary continued to rise, before falling into a difficult phase after the 2008 financial crisis and the new collective bargaining agreement that followed in 2011, which reduced player salaries from 57% of basketball-related revenues to about 50%. The scatterplot shows that there is no perfect correlation between height and average salary, but we can certainly see a trend where tall players are paid more on average than smaller players. The amount NBA rookies receive depends on when they are drafted into the league and the league`s salary cap for the season. A player drafted early in a season with a high salary cap will make the most money. While players drafted in the first round receive lucrative contracts with guaranteed salaries, all other rookies must negotiate their salaries with their respective teams. For the 2021-22 season, all rookies received at least $925,258 if they stayed on a team for the entire season. After the increase in salaries in the NBA, the most lucrative contracts in the league come from the last 2 seasons. In this section, we`ll give you a brief overview of the biggest contracts in NBA history. The average salary for an NBA player is about $7.5 million.

Each NBA team plays 82 games during the regular season. This means that players earn an average of about $91,463 per game. Since each NBA game has 48 minutes of regulation time, NBA players earn an average of about $1,905 per minute per game. Between the ages of 18 and 27, NBA players make up an average of 5.3% of the salary cap. Over the past 3 seasons, the salary of the league`s point guards has increased by an average of 20%, the highest in the league. NBA players will receive an average salary of $7.5 million per year for the 2020-2021 season. This number is not small and proves the popularity and love of the public for the tournament. While many NBA players receive their salaries every two weeks, some choose to be paid through various methods such as loans or advances. After signing the contract, a player can choose to immediately receive a certain percentage of his salary. This deposit cannot exceed the lower of the two options: either 80% of the player`s guaranteed salary, or 50% of the player`s base salary. The biggest increase in average salary in the NBA came during the 2016-17 season, when it rose $4.85 million to $5.97 million, a 23 percent jump. Undrafted free agents and second-round picks often benefit from minimum wage contracts, but there are plenty of veterans who also settle for the minimum.

Because a player`s minimum salary depends on their NBA experience, many veterans make more than twice as much money as a rookie in the 2022-23 season on a minimum-wage contract. Second on the list is Houston Rockets point guard John Wall. 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. Because the NBA doesn`t want teams to avoid signing experienced players in favor of cheaper, younger players, the league reimburses clubs that sign veterans with three or more years of experience on one-year minimum wage contracts. These transactions only count towards the cap – and a team`s bank balance – of $1,836,090, the minimum salary for a player with two years of experience. An average salary of $8.5 million sounds incredible, but NBA player salaries are not evenly distributed at all. During the 2021-22 season, five players earned more than $40 million in annual salary (Steph Curry, Russell Westbrook, James Harden, Lebron James and Kevin Durant), while 93 players earned less than $2 million. However, many NBA players earn much more.

Salaries for some players, ranked 526th in total league salaries this season at $186,000, jump to $1.7 million for the 2020-21 season. This highlights the importance of a good contract, a good season of play and a great agent or negotiator. The average salary for an NBA shooting guard during the 2020-21 season is $6.50 million, up 7% year-over-year. In 2022, bench players in the NBA earned an average of $4.2 million, while starters earned $14.9 million. In the `90s, the average NBA salary was 74 percent of the average salary, peaking at 84 percent in the 1993-94 season. In December, Harden officially became an investor and creative director of Pura Fragrances.