Lets face the facts the NBA is messed up, to put it lightly. The average player salary last season was around $4.8 million. So if the entire league were to pay their players equally after taxes, based on the highest 35% tax bracket, they would make 3.11 million each, or slightly less than 60k each week. Can anyone tell me why this model is failing? I'm having a hard time seeing the error in their ways...
The median income for an American household is around 65k which is only 5k more per year than NBA players get paid weekly. That doesn't even seem right. For players like Kobe and Lebron it seems fair for them to make substantially more based on their abilities that 99.999999999% of normal human beings do not posses, but even if they were making the league average they could afford a car twice as nice as probably 80% of Americans will ever drive... weekly.
For the NFL the numbers are more reasonable. The average salary is consistently around 1.5 million and the median is about 750k. Still in the 35% tax bracket with those numbers, a salary of 750k becomes about 500k forcing the ordinary NFL player to live on around 9k a week. These poor, poor souls.
Now to put them in slightly less evil perspective... The average career of an NFL player lasts 3.5 years and the NBA is around 4.5 years. So total earnings for your average career in the NFL is around 1.75 million at the median salary, and in the NBA it is 21.55 million using the average salary and length.
So given these numbers, and the average total earnings of your high school graduate(1.2 million), an NFL player squeaks out with less than half a million more while the NBA player is close to 20 times either of them.
Both leagues should be able to set up retirement accounts, profit sharing, and above all else charitable minimums for players. This salary info alone proves how stingy the NFL is and how careless the NBA has been especially when you compare the profitability of each league's franchises. If the NBA were to institute minimum percentages that each player and team was to give to charity, retirement, and profit sharing then you could very easily improve the cities they are in and eliminate bankruptcy cases such as that of Antoine Walker.
In the NFL if they were to do the same but have the owner's absorbing most of the burden percentage wise they could very easily set up the systems needed to combat the affect of concussions in later life along with the unfortunate conditions some players end up in.
Still unaccounted for is the earning potential for retired players in each league. Old players never die, they just become analysts, coaches, or run their own foundations. But that's a different discussion for a different day... that always ends with my hatred for Tim Hasselbeck.
5 Good Reasons the NBA needs to change:
Rashard Lewis - 19.5m
Michael Redd - 18.3m
Gilbert Arenas - 17.7m
Yao Ming - 17.6m (If he ever played a full season maybe he's worth it)
Vince Carter - 17.5m
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