Television bonanza has contracts soaring
LAS VEGAS — To understand how the business model of NBA salaries is unlike ever before, consider the cases of Reggie Jackson, Khris Middleton and DeMarre Carroll. They’re not All-Stars. They’re not exactly household names, either.
Nonetheless, the trio got a combined $210 million in deals this summer: Jackson got $80 million over five years from the Detroit Pistons; Middleton got a five-year, $70 million deal to stay with the Milwaukee Bucks; and Carroll signed a four-year contract worth nearly $60 million to join the Toronto Raptors.
“The numbers you hear out there, they seem crazy to think about,” Miami Heat center Hassan Whiteside said.
Thanks to a $24 billion television deal that kicks in before the 2016-17 season, already skyrocketing salaries will soon reach a new stratosphere. It’s hard to fathom that a league that dealt with serious labor strife four years ago and might be looking at another work stoppage in a couple years is about to become flush with so much cash.
“One of the things we’re learning is that there is so much that’s unpredictable when the cap is moving so dramatically as it did — as it will next year and the year after that,” commissioner Adam Silver said. “We’re continuing to study how our system is absorbing the money.”
The salary cap for this coming season was supposed to rise considerably to $67 million; it went even higher, to $70 million. The salary cap for the 2016-17 season might be $90 million. For the season after that, maybe $110 million or more.
These days, players that might not have been considered stars are getting what would recently have been star-level deals. John Wall — one of the league’s elite point guards — of the Washington Wizards aired his complaints earlier this week. “I’m getting the same as Reggie Jackson,” he lamented, as quoted by CSN Washington.
Wall, a two-time All-Star, is going into the second year of a five-year, $85 million deal. Jackson cashed in after averaging nearly 18 points in 27 games with Detroit this past season, a breakout that followed 3½ seasons of largely unheralded work.
Under the current CBA, player salaries are supposed to make up about 50.4 percent of the league’s basketball-related income. This past season, income grew more than anticipated and that meant the league wrote a check to the National Basketball Players Association to cover the difference — roughly $57 million.
Silver thinks that might look like peanuts next year.
“We could be writing a check moving close to half a billion dollars to the players association,” he said. “It’s happened because the revenue we generated was much higher than we had ever modeled. But we’re also learning that when you have all that money coming into the system, team behavior isn’t necessarily predictable either.”
The numbers right now are huge, which is giving some within the game hope that the league and the union — which can opt out of the current collective bargaining agreement in two years — can avoid any more interruptions in play.
The growth has been steady in recent years, though now the climb seems to be much steeper. In 2011, the average annual value of new free-agent contracts was about $5 million. So far this year, it’s flirting with the $10 million mark.