I built a tool to compare NBA contracts across different eras - here's what I learned

How do LeBron James's contracts stack up in our tool?

Published on June 3rd, 2025

I had previously built a tool that allows you to compare a given dollar amount as a percentage of the cap across different years using the NBA salary cap's history. For example, you could plug in Jeff Green's hefty $15M salary in 2016-2017 and see what it would have been the year prior, before the Great Cap Spike of 2016. Or you could plug in Stephen Curry's $55 million in 2024-2025 and see what that would've been in his rookie year, 2009-2010.

Now I've supercharged the tool. When you type in a contract value, it automatically finds the players making the closest amount of money in the initial year you set AND the comparison year. Going back to the players I just mentioned, you can see Green's deal that year is similar to Cam Johnson's today, and that Curry still made less as a percentage of the cap than Kobe did in 2009-2010!

While it's super fun to dive in and try out different year combinations, I've noticed some trends while playing around with the new tool. I've done the deep dive for you and found 4 interesting facts:

1. Contracts Took Up More of the Cap This Past Year

When comparing $25 million in 2024-2025 to 2014-2015, I saw that making that amount, ~18% of the cap, makes you the 62nd highest-paid player today, but the 49th player back then. We're comparing these salaries as a percentage of the cap, so you would expect the amount to be similar. Let's take a look at the top 150 salaries from those years.

The median from each year is represented by a dotted line, which was 13% in 2014-2015 but 16% in 2024-2025! But is this a trend or just an anomaly? Let's take a look at the median cap percentage of the top 150 players over the past 25 years.

It's definitely not a consistent upswing; instead, it looks more like a sudden jump from years past. Why did this happen? The simple answer is that the cap rose by a smaller percentage from 2023-2024 to 2024-2025 than in most years past, only about 3%. When a lot of contracts contain the maximum 8% year-over-year raise, this creates a crunch if the cap goes up by less.

2. Tippity Top Stars Make Less as a Percentage of the Cap

Despite the boom in salaries as the cap has doubled from $70 million in 2015-2016 to $140 million today, stars don't always make as much as a percentage of the salary cap as they used to. The chart below shows the percentage of the cap the largest contract that year took up.

Dang dog, looks like Shaq and KG got paid, while LeBron and Steph got chump change! In the 1999 CBA, max contracts were introduced after the "Too Fast, Too Soon" era, as dubbed by Bill Simmons. This introduced limits on what players could make as a percentage of the cap based on their experience. Before that CBA, players could sign for whatever they and the team agreed to, so players whose contracts were grandfathered in continued to look gargantuan.

How did Kobe make such fat stacks in 2013 then? Well, as usual, the CBA is never that straightforward. The max contract limits apply to just the first year of the deal; players can get annual raises that take them over the initial percentage they were maxed out at in the first year. When you have a big name like Kobe who the Lakers were willing to pay like a star for 20 years, you can get a pretty high percentage.

3. All Contracts Looked Good in 2016

When the salary cap jumped from $70M to $94M in 2016, the eye-popping contract numbers made value hard to understand.

5 years and 153 million for Mike Conley, cover your ears honey!

4 years and 94 million for Harrison Barnes, that's disgusting.

4 years and 72 million for Joakim Noah, I'd rather pay $5 for a photo with Spider-Man in Times Square.

But when you take a look at the contracts signed, they weren't total disasters. Sorry, you're right—Joakim Noah was a total disaster for the Knicks.

Let's take Mike Conley's deal. In the first year, he made 28.2% of the cap, or $26M. In the year before the cap boom, that puts him in the same range as DeAndre Jordan, Brook Lopez, and Marc Gasol. While you can debate if Conley was as good as those players then, he was at least a high-level starter and borderline All-Star. In fact, aside from LeBron, no one made more than 28.5%. While you'd love to pay Ryan Anderson less than $20M a year, the truth is that no single deal sunk a team's cap that summer.

4. LeBron's Deals Were Steals!

When you enter high salary amounts for each year into our tool, you'll be surprised to often not see LeBron James at the top of the totem pole. During a span in which LeBron won 4 championships, 4 MVPs, and 10 All-NBA first teams, he was an average of the 11th highest-paid player in the NBA! While the limits on max contracts will always ensure super-duper stars are underpaid relative to their true market value, James's contract was a huge value from a team-building standpoint to have the best NBA player of all time making less than his full earning potential. Below shows where LeBron's contracts ranked each year.

Don't worry about James's finances though, he has a full B-nut, as the tech bros in Mountainhead would say.

Wrapping Up

I hope you've enjoyed learning some interesting tidbits about contracts and the salary cap. You can check out the tool here. If you find anything interesting yourself or learned something from this article, please share on social media! Also, for now, our player contract data only goes back to 1999-2000. If you'd like to see more data, please click below to let us know, or use our contact form.