APBRmetrics

According to BRef salary data, NBA teams will spend $2.2 billion (about $73 million per team) on the 67 players scheduled to make $20+ million next season. Maybe a few more will get that but the chances may not be that strong for them.

As of now, it comes to an average of about 2.2 such players per team at an average salary of about $33 million.

42 make $30+ mil. Only 25 are in the 20s. (Going out of style?)

65 or about 2.2 per team make between $10-20 million. 75 or 2.5 per team make $5-10 mil.

These totals may be incomplete. But it probably has all but a few of the top contracts. This goes almost 7 players per team deep.

(Only 348 contracts are listed, but most of the missing will probably be low end. I may update later.)

Can use these averages to see where specific teams stand compared to them.

Player near the $50 mil mark are about 1.5X the average and about 2.5X the $20 mil "floor".

Spending on the top 67 / 2.2 per team over $20 million represents about 54% of the salary cap (not total spending). Spending on top 7 per team may be around 90% of cap but has not be calculated exactly and probably shouldn't until all the salaries are in. Top 4 per team may be getting around $100 mil on average or about 74% of the cap.

Thunder currently under-represented compared to league average for first tier by 1, over-represented in tier 2 by 1 and way over-represented in tier 3 by 2.5. That probably changes for tier 1 and 2 over time but how far / how fast? Tier 3 is likely to be over-represented for a long time. There will be increasing tension between tier 1 / 2 and tier 3, with how much depending on overall willingness to spend and for how long.

How long will this era sustain / last? 5 years? 7? More? Of course there is no solid answer but more than 5 years gets a lot tougher. Very quickly it will get to... pay someone, don't pay someone else and probably push a high paid guy out one way or the other.

You may have seen Bobby Marks present a similar list recently, with more contracts signed. No change at very top and hardly any change except at bottom and near bottom.

On team salary design:

https://x.com/bballstrategy/status/1709 ... 63210?s=20

I should give up paying attention to salaries. $20-30 million / yr players with little or no impact. It is will get worse. Probably much worse.

There are some prior contracts in the $30-35 million range that are fine. I was mainly talking about in the future.