Wembanyama, heading toward $301 million

Victor Wembanyama is, step by step, fulfilling the best expectations held before his arrival in the NBA. In fact, more than step by step it has been stride by stride: surely not even the most optimistic expected that in just three years he would be playing in the Finals as third in MVP voting, Defensive Player of the Year, two-time All-Star and a member of the All-NBA First Team. The phenomenon from Le Chesnay won’t turn 23 until next January, so right now it seems crazy to try to predict how far he can go or what the ceiling of his career will be. It’s frightening to imagine... especially for the 29 teams that didn’t have that No. 1 pick in the 2023 draft, the selection that was considered historically valuable at the time, and which, after this first stretch of his career, allows one to shift from optimism to triumphalism: Wembanyama could end up being one of the greatest players in basketball history. Even if that group is tightly constrained: the fingers of one hand… or fewer. His talents and trajectory point in that direction, although there is obviously a long way to go.

Wembanyama is also, for now, a bargain for his team, the San Antonio Spurs. In fact, business-side analysts in the sport estimated that simply being able to select the Frenchman in the draft represented, by itself, a $500 million increase in the franchise’s value. Yet his salary is a steal: in an NBA where the average is around $11 million, he earns $13.3 million this season after taking $12.1 and $12.7 in his first two years in the League, with $16.8 million set for next season. It’s the total of the four-year contract (initially only the first two years were guaranteed) that corresponded to him as the No. 1 pick of the 2023 draft: four years, $55.1 million.

Salary scale

First-round players (picks 1–30) have their salaries set for those first four NBA seasons under scales that govern those picks (not second-rounders, only first-rounders) and include two guaranteed years and two unilateral team options that franchises must exercise (team options). Even if players become stars or look poised to, they cannot sign their first major extension until those initial four seasons are completed. They can, and that is the case Wembanyama will be in, sign one after the third season ends. It will take effect, in any case, a year later, but it will already be set and guaranteed. Security for both sides: if the player continues progressing, the team won’t live in fear of losing him. If things go wrong (injuries, issues…), he will have that new salary secured.

In Wembanyama’s draft class, that rookie scale awarded him as the No. 1 pick, upon entering the NBA, that 4x$55.1 million contract. With the rise of the salary cap (what each team can spend on salaries in a season), subsequent No. 1 picks have had higher contracts: Zaccharie Risacher (2024) signed for four years and $57 million, and Cooper Flagg (2025) for four years and $62.7 million. Already $7.6 million more than Wemby.

But this summer will be Wembanyama’s moment, and a contract that, obviously, will be the maximum possible. The Spurs will offer it, of course, with no discount. And he will accept because he is clearly happy on a team he has already taken to the Finals with two outstanding lieutenants (Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper) who are only 21 and 20 years old; and because it’s the chance to sign his first monstrous, generational deal. With the salary cap set at $165 million, it would be for five years and $251 million. An average of $50.2 million per year. With the option to jump from the max to the supermax, it could be those same five years for $301 million. An average of $60.2 million.

That is the play with rookie extensions, a key moment for the player and the franchise, which thus secures the option to retain the players they have drafted and developed for three years without them even reaching the market and attracting other suitors (in Wembanyama’s case, the other 29 teams). The max calculation is based on 25% of the salary cap (the threshold for players with six years or less in the League) for the following season, with increases of 8% each subsequent season from that base. But the supermax option allows a direct jump to 30% of the cap, an accelerator known as the Derrick Rose Rule, because it was implemented when the point guard won MVP with the Chicago Bulls in 2011 at just 21 and still on his rookie contract.

Those are the main lines of pre-expiration contract extensions in the NBA. The maximum up to the sixth season (including the year remaining when negotiating) is 25% with the option to jump to 30% in the Designated Rookie Extension category (the Derrick Rose Rule). For veterans with seven or eight years in the NBA who are one or two years away from the end of their contract (provided they spent their first four years with the same team or were traded without changing sides as free agents), they can jump from 30% to 35% of the salary cap under the Designated Veteran Extension, the supermax for their tier. The new contract can only be for six years… included (one or two) of what remains on the current deal. For players with more than ten years in the League, that maximum can be 35% without applying special criteria.

The big leap for Wemby

For a player’s rookie extension to trigger the Derrick Rose Rule and raise the extension from 25% to 30% of the cap, he must meet at least one of these three milestones: be named to the All-NBA Teams in the season preceding the extension’s start or in two of the previous three; be named Defensive Player of the Year in the season before or in two of the previous three; or have been MVP in any of the previous three seasons. Wembanyama will be a clear MVP candidate (he was third in voting this season) and a heavy favorite for Defensive Player of the Year, which he won this season; and, of course, for All-NBA teams.

His only concern, in principle, will be reaching the 65 games required to certify these awards (MVP, Defensive Player of the Year, All-NBA teams). How much he is protected from injuries will determine that extra $50 million. The Frenchman has already experienced a case like this, but from the other side of the equation: in 2025, last season, he was on track for Defensive Player of the Year (which he has won this season and appears likely to win many more), but he finished with 46 games due to blood clots, a serious scare that forced him to stop on February 12. That prevented him from winning an award that seemed his, which went to Evan Mobley, who was thus able to secure supermax status in his rookie extension with the Cavaliers: the power forward received an extra $44.8 million, from $224.2 million to $269 million.

Television deals keep the system afloat

These figures that until recently seemed impossible, and that sound like science fiction outside the United States, are directly tied to the major television operators: the crux, the core of the economic issue. The main support of the NBA and the primary source of revenue for everyone. They are part of the BRI (Basketball Related Income) — all income directly related to the game itself: television, merchandising and concessions, parking… The split of that BRI between franchises and players is usually the big battleground in collective bargaining negotiations. In the previous agreement, players received an amount that ranged, depending on variables, between 49% and 51%; in the current one they secure around 51% (49% remains for owners).

The salary cap, the limit all teams have to spend on salaries each season, depends on that BRI. That’s why when TV contracts skyrocket, the cap does too — and therefore player contracts rise as well. The major revolution came in 2015, when a deal was struck with Disney (ESPN and ABC) and Turner (TNT) for about $24 billion over nine years (2016–2025). The scale of that deal is clear when compared with the previous one, in which Disney paid about $485 million and Turner about $445 million. Annual revenue tripled, exceeding $2.6 billion per year. With that injection, the salary cap went haywire: $63 million in 2014–15, $70 million in 2015–16 (the last year of the previous TV deal)… and $94 million in 2016–17. A new world.

If you review history, the growth in contracts has been dizzying. NBC and Turner agreed to pay $2.6 billion total over four years before the 1998–99 season. Back then, the salary cap was set at $30 million and the average player salary did not exceed $2.5 million. From there it moved to a $4.6 billion contract (ABC, ESPN, Turner) over six seasons; then to $7.4 billion over seven — the precursor to the 2016 revolution (24x9) — which has since been dwarfed by the new, more complex broadcast framework with more players involved that delivers $76 billion to the NBA over eleven years. A record sum and record seasons.

In 2016, the influx of so much money caused an unprecedented distortion in the market. It allowed, for example, the Warriors to have the flexibility to bring in Kevin Durant. At least, it was one of the factors that made a seemingly impossible operation feasible. It also led teams, in that inflationary environment, to sign many overly large contracts. So much so that subsequent market windows suffered. Franchises, with the spender’s guilt, had to keep paying contracts that proved disastrous on the court; and middle- and lower-tier players found a market with worse opportunities. Since no one wanted that to happen again with the next TV deal, the latest collective bargaining agreement specified that the salary cap could not increase year-to-year by more than 10%. Thus, if revenue growth exceeds that figure, it is prorated to avoid a monstrous, distorted cap. Basically, to prevent the market from getting out of control again.

In the 2025–26 season, these new TV deals came into force, surpassing the $75 billion total that journalist Jabari Young (CNBC) reported in 2021 — to the astonishment of many who then thought those figures were outrageous. The previous deal, which already induced vertigo, set annual totals above $2.6 billion, nearly tripling the earlier amount. Now, with that $76 billion over 11 years, we’ve entered the range of more than $6.9 billion per year. Again, nearly triple. This ensured, of course, that the cap would continue rising for several years, although it has shown that it does not always hit the 10% cap ceiling.

ESPN and ABC (that is, Disney) took the premium package, for which they now pay about $2.6 billion per year (previously around $1.4 billion). They retained, above all, exclusive Finals rights (ABC has aired them since 2003). But NBC returned and Amazon Prime entered the map. TNT Sports, present in NBA broadcasts since the eighties, was left out.

In addition to the Finals, ESPN and ABC retained exclusive rights to one of the two conference finals. ABC began airing games Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons after the dominant NFL season. For ESPN, Wednesday became a marquee night, with games also on Fridays and Sundays.

NBC, which was part of broadcasts from 1990 to 2002, now pays nearly $2.5 billion per year, and placed its games on Sunday nights — again, when they don’t conflict with the NFL. It also aired games on Tuesdays during the regular season and parceled another package to Mondays on one of its exclusive channels, Peacock. Prime Video (Amazon), for its part, pays about $1.8 billion per year and controls Thursday nights… once again, outside NFL windows. Its alternative nights were Fridays and Saturdays. NBC and Prime Video split the other conference final. TNT Sports had been paying about $1.4 billion.

These new deals have had an obvious effect on BRI, and therefore on the salary cap and player salaries. So much so that in the next decade the $500 million total and $100 million annual barriers will be in view at the upper end of top-tier maximums. It must be reiterated that TV agreements will likely allow reaching that new 10% annual growth control threshold many times, which would initially place the cap above $200 million in the 2028–29 season and above $300 million (more than double the current $141 million) in 2032–33. So we are less than seven years away from franchises (likely 32 by then) having more than $300 million to spend annually on roster construction.

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