The exponential growth of the NBA TV contracts will ultimately lead to star players signing deals worth a total of over $500 million.
Disney’s ESPN and ABC and Warner Bros. Discovery’s TNT in total are paying an average of $2.6 billion a year in the current NBA rights deals, and that amount is primed to more than double.
Based on the league’s collective bargaining agreement (CBA), which calls for the players to receive about half of the income, player contracts will eventually move in accordance.
Bobby Marks, the ESPN NBA analyst who was previously the assistant GM of the Nets, told The Post that his current projections indicate we will see the first $100 million-per-year deal in about 2032.
Marks cautioned that it won’t be like the summer of 2016, where the cap suddenly spiked at once, and the Warriors infamously had the extra space to add Kevin Durant to their already-stacked roster — but that the monster deals totaling over a half-billion dollars are an inevitability unless the CBA gets totally overhauled.
“There are provisions in the CBA where the salary cap is smoothed to a 10 percent annual increase. It’s not like the prior years, like 2016, where TV revenue came in and all of a sudden the cap spiked,” Marks said.
“There’s provisions in there as far as what happens if the TV deal doubles. One of the provisions is it would trigger a cause where the players’ association would have the right to negotiate new language about how you can phase in that money.
“When you look at it, it’s probably unrealistic that we would see a $100 million player in the next five or six years.”
Marks said that there is projected to be a jump of about 3.7 percent this offseason, and then it should go up about 10 percent a year from there given the new TV deals and the smoothing provisions.
“When you take that into account, you get to a $100 million-a-year player in the 2032-33 season. Maybe a little sooner, but I don’t see it happening within the next five years,” he said.
The cap next year will be about $141 million, and it jumps to over $300 million by 2032, according to Marks’ projections.
He analogized the annual tradition of new record salaries in the NBA to a game of “follow the leader” — Jaylen Brown signed a record five-year contract worth $288 million with the Celtics last offseason.
This offseason it will be Jayson Tatum eligible to receive a five-year deal for $315 million and then next year it will be Luka Doncic, eligible to receive a five-year contract for a total $347 million, according to Marks’ projections.
The young stars now will reap the rewards as players like Tatum, Doncic, Anthony Edwards, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Victor Wembanyama ink stratospheric deals.
The sticker shock will be palpable when the numbers start approaching and then surpassing a half-billion dollars, and the superstars are paid more and more like oligarchs.
“The reality, with everything being a percentage of the salary cap, is the money is far greater than what, say, Allen Iverson was making with a max in 2000 — however, the percentage of the salary cap is still the same,” Marks said.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that ESPN will pay about $2.6 billion alone to keep a bulk of its rights, which include the NBA Finals, and that Comcast’s NBC bid $2.5 billion for what is presently TNT’s package.
WBD has matching rights and could keep the package, but no matter where these rights land it will be for about double the money from the previous TV deal.
And that’s without accounting for Amazon, whose financial outlay is currently unknown as The Athletic reported last week the company has the “framework” of a deal with the NBA.
The current NBA CBA runs through the 2029-30 season, with both sides having the option to terminate one year earlier.
Regardless of how that shakes out, with the amount of money coming into the sport via the TV contract it’s impossible to imagine the rate of player pay abating anytime soon.
