Salary data for professional basketball players in the United States predates the existence of the National Basketball Association (NBA), the professional basketball league whose games fans all over the nation-and the world-tune into today. Early Professional Basketball Players’ Salaries: 1940s and 1950s Where data is adjusted for inflation, inflation calculators from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis were used. Unless stated otherwise, salary data is presented in nominal dollars-what the amount was at the time reported, unadjusted for inflation. The unadjusted salary data presented for top earners during these seasons is sourced from HoopsHype. As a result, the unadjusted salary figures presented here are drawn from select MVPs (winners of the National Basketball Association’s Most Valuable Player Award) who were top performers and, as such, high earners during these decades.įrom the 1990s on, NBA salary data becomes more plentiful. Salary data from the 1940s through the 1980s is less comprehensive than that of subsequent decades, when full lists of contracts and salaries for all players in the league were compiled in readily-available records. There’s a lot more we can learn about the inflation of professional basketball salaries by digging into the data. The highest-paid basketball player today makes 360 times what one of the highest-earning basketball players of the 1940s did after adjusting for inflation and more than 5,722 times that unadjusted 1946 salary. In today’s dollars, that salary would translate to $127,080.88-just a tiny fraction of the top NBA salary for the 2021 through 2022 season, which surpasses $45,000,000. If the salaries of top pro basketball players had increased by the same amount as the CPI, they wouldn’t be remotely comparable to the sky-high salaries we’re used to seeing basketball stars earn today.įor example, take $8,000, one of the most lucrative basketball player salaries in 1946. That’s an increase of nearly 1,300%, or nearly 14 times the 1946 CPI value. The national Consumer Price Index (CPI) has climbed from 19.5 in 1946 to 271.0 in 2021, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. ![]() In basketball, as in other sports, the salaries of top-performing professional players have increased at rates that far outstrip the median household income rate and the inflation rate as it pertains to consumer prices. Today, the highest-paid players in the National Basketball Association earn more than 600 times the median family’s income for the year. ![]() ![]() When professional basketball in the United States was in its infancy, star players made about 2.5 times what the average family made in a year.
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