When could we see an NBA player make $100 million per year? Boardroom chats with ESPN’s Bobby Marks to project the first nine-figure annual basketball salary.
A day after a convincing 26-point win in Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals last week, Oklahoma City Thunder superstar Shai Gilgeous-Alexander won his first MVP award. It was not just a watershed moment for the 26-year-old Canadian point guard, who won 71 of the 100 first-place votes ahead of the Denver Nuggets‘ three-time MVP Nikola Jokić; it will also be one for his bank account.
As he leads the Thunder to the NBA Finals for the first time since the 2011-12 season, salary cap experts around the NBA noted that he’s now eligible to sign a four-year, $293 million supermax contract that would make him the first player in league history to make more than $80 million per season in 2030-31. Suppose SGA waits until the summer of 2026 and accrues an additional year of service time. In that case, he’d be eligible to sign a five-year, $380 million extension that would be worth $88 million in the deal’s final season, potentially making him the first player to make more than $1 million per regular-season game.
That got me thinking even bigger. When could we see the first NBA player making more than $100 million per season?
I immediately reached out to ESPN to speak with its excellent front office insider Bobby Marks, who just four years ago helped me project the NBA’s first $60 million-per-year player. Assuming the salary cap increases by 10% a year — far from a guarantee — we could see the first nine-figure annual salary in the league for the 2032-33 season.
A supermax salary starting that year would pay a whopping $105 million in the first season, Marks said, an astronomical amount. But this projection, however, is far from a sure thing.
“We have to pump the brakes a little bit on this notion that the salary cap is going to go up 10% every year,” Marks told Boardroom. “After 2026-27, there’s still some uncertainty with it.”
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With the decline of regional sports networks, Marks said that a potential dip in revenue could slow the cap’s growth and, therefore, delay the $100 million timeline. And right now, superstar players need to meet certain criteria to be eligible for this type of payday.
To qualify for the NBA’s supermax contract, you have to be entering your eighth or ninth season, you must have won an MVP in the last three seasons or made All-NBA in two of the previous three seasons, and you must still be with the team that drafted you or have been acquired by that team during your rookie contract. A player like Gilgeous-Alexander meets all these requirements and would have to again hit those benchmarks at the end of his next contract to become that $100 million man.
“We’re still a little bit way off from that, but it’s getting there,” Marks said. “There might be different rules by then, too.”
The current NBA collective bargaining agreement, ratified in 2023, runs through the 2029-30 season, with both the league and the players’ association able to opt out after the 2028-29 season. So there is the potential, Marks stressed, for the rules on how max salaries are determined and structured by the time a player is eligible for this record payday anyway.
Nikola Jokić (Alonzo Adams / Imagn Images)
SGA would be 33 when negotiating a potential milestone contract in 2032, likely on the back end of his prime at that point. Fellow MVP Jokić will be turning 37, making him an unlikely candidate to crack the century mark.
“There’s nobody that’s going to pay him $100 million, as great as he is, when he’s 36 years old,” Marks said.
Perhaps an ascendant young supernova like Victor Wembanyama is the perfect example of someone who could get this contract, which would come after his ninth season at age 28. Regardless, an athlete — or anyone, really — making $100 million per season in salary is unheard of in North American sports and rare globally, aside from the Saudi professional soccer league, which paid superstars like Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema that amount in 2024-25. For it to become the benchmark amount to pay the best NBA players is still hard to fully put my head around.
Whether it happens during this timeline or a little later, the first $100 million NBA player is coming. The American sporting world may never be the same.
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Shlomo Sprung
Shlomo Sprung is a Senior Staff Writer at Boardroom. He has more than a decade of experience in journalism, with past work appearing in Forbes, MLB.com, Awful Announcing, and The Sporting News. He graduated from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2011, and his Twitter and Spotify addictions are well under control. Just ask him.