The past 20 years have seen an exponential increase in NBA wages. The league’s players are predicted to earn much more than $60 million year, as evidenced by the fact that five of them were recently listed among the top 15 athletes in Forbes Magazine’s 2023 list of highest-paid athletes. Though this wasn’t always the case, more NBA players have guaranteed salaries that are higher than those of almost any other sport in the world.
Charles Barkley remembers being astounded by Magic Johnson‘s 25-year, $25 million deal with the Los Angeles Lakers in the most recent episode of the Club Shay Shay podcast. He said to Shannon Sharpe, host,
“I remember vividly. Me, Doc [Julius Erving], Moses [Malone], Bobby Jones, Andrew Toney were in the locker room one day, and it broke that Magic Johnson had been the first NBA player to make a million dollars. We were walking around high-fiving each other. We could not believe that an NBA player made a million dollars… That’s how crazy it was thinking about money back in the day.”
Only Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Moses Malone and Julius Erving of the Philadelphia 76ers, Otis Birdsong of the New Jersey Nets, Bill Walton of the San Diego Clippers, and teammate Johnson received a $1 million annual pay when they signed the 25-year agreement.
Magic Johnson’s contract details
The Los Angeles Lakers offered the point guard the largest guaranteed deal in American sports history after just two seasons of NBA play. Conversely, in 1981, Walton and Malone were starting their eighth season, Birdsong had just signed with the Nets following four years with the Kansas City Kings, Erving had played ten seasons, and Kareem was a twelve-year veteran.
The market for younger stars was reset when a third-year player made the same as the five highest-paid NBA players, giving veterans the right to demand at least twice as much when their contracts were up for renewal.
Johnson’s record-breaking contract extension set a precedent for other players in the league and sparked a trend of players signing larger deals annually. And the wave is still rising.
The largest contract in NBA history, for $286,230,000, was inked by Jaylen Brown last year. However, it will eventually pale in comparison to Dallas Mavericks star Luka Doncic, who is qualified to sign a five-year, $346 million supermax agreement in the 2025 offseason, earning about $70 million annually.
Barkley recognized that Johnson’s historic 1981 pact would forever alter the lives of NBA players, and it was the beginning of it all.
He did, however, come dangerously close to leaving the action altogether once.