In today’s world of sports, money is being thrown around like its nothing. Teams are offering hundred million dollar contracts to players all over the place. Over 20 players in the NBA are currently signed to a deal worth over 100 million dollars. Are these players worth this amount of money? The NBA is a business and just like any other business, its main goal is too make money. The NBA is bringing in such a high revenue every year that it can afford to pay the astronomically large contracts to the players. So if the NBA is making tons of money, shouldn’t the players be rewarded and compensated fairly? The answer is yes. These players are extremely gifted and their skills provide for great entertainment to the millions of fans around the world. It is because of the players, that the fans are willing to pay a good amount of money to watch games live or online. Therefore, the players deserve to receive a high cut of the revenue that the NBA brings in each year. Other people, mainly who are of different professions, tend to disagree with the league’s pay scale and prefer the money go to a different line of work. It is these people who provide the basis for the other side of this argument. The total amount of revenue made by the NBA last year was just about $6 Billion. In comparison, Lebron James, the consensus best player, made about $23 million. That is less than 1% of all the revenue (Badenhausen). That statistic is the reason why players contracts seem like a lot to the public but little to the people in the NBA business. 

To some people, it is understandable that an athlete is able to make millions of dollars per year. Others would overwhelmingly disagree. Michael Walden of the Charlotte Observer was one of the people on the other end of the debate. His wife posed this question to him, “Why do professional baseball players, who engage in a sport that was invented for fun, earn 1,000 times more than school teachers?” She added, “Certainly teaching school is more important than hitting and throwing a baseball. How can our economy – or any economy – allow such a disparity to happen?” She certainly does make her case here. Teachers are vital to the future of America as they provide the backbone of knowledge for which the children use as they grow older in order to make a difference in life. Doctors can also fit into this category as they are literally “life-savers”. Doctors are arguably among the most important people on the Earth as they are the ones who cure people of diseases and give hope to people and families who are ill. 

It is understandable why people would argue that doctors have a much more serious job and therefore deserve a higher payday. However, if someone in favor of higher salaries for doctors were to look at the amount of revenue a hospital brings in, and then compare it with the doctor’s salary, they would find that doctors make a higher percentage of the revenue they helped bring in compared to an NBA player. By using this as a measure of comparing pay for each profession, it would appear that doctors are paid accurately. The thing that separates them is that the NBA revenue is so much higher than what a hospital makes that even the smallest of percentages is greater than almost all of the doctor’s salaries regardless of their high percentages (Plunkett). 

Athletes today are worth millions of dollars to their teams. When the owners pay their players, they aren’t just getting the skills, but also their name and with that comes the real value. Walking around the street today, kids are wearing basketball jerseys with the team name on the front and the player’s name on the back. It is the player who brings the popularity to the team, and with that comes jersey and apparel sales. Just last season, Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors made over $6 million off the court from apparel sales (Badenhausen). That is just one player on one team in the NBA. Lebron James makes over $43 million in just one year from endorsements (Badenhausen). His main endorsement, Nike, doesn’t just use his basketball skills in their promotions of him but also the fact that he is such a great man. Two years ago, when Lebron James decided to play in his hometown of Cleveland, Nike created a commercial in which “the citizens of Cleveland” gathered around Lebron and they chanted “Family on 3, Together on 6.” The companies and teams aren’t paying for just the skills but the name of the player and their appearance to society as well. The owners are bringing in loads of money by selling merchandise with their player’s name on it, and its only fair that the players are compensated for their worth.  

Putting this idea into perspective now, how would an average person feel about making millions of dollars by playing basketball in the NBA with millions of fans cheering your name. It is highly unlikely that too many people would turn down that offer. So in that case, should today’s players be punished or looked at harshly, because they are talented enough to be in the league and are better than the average friendly competitor? People envy what they can’t have. The reason why athletes getting paid millions is such a big topic of discussion is because of greed. The logic is there: a player plays in a game, fans are entertained and buy merchandise/ tickets, the league generates a total revenue and splits it with the owners, and, finally, the owners distribute that to the players. The players are putting on a show for millions of fans around the world who are theoretically willing to collectively pay billions of dollars to continue seeing their favorite stars on the big stage. There is no reason why a player shouldn’t be fully compensated for what he’s worth and what he has brought in to the league as a contributor. People don’t judge successful businessmen for making this type of money because they believe that those men/women are professionals and are properly earning their money. What does a businessman do that contributes to others “average” citizens that basketball doesn’t? The only reason basketball players are critized for earning such high salaries is because adults watch their kids and other children play and think “Wouldn’t it be great if I could act like a kid and become rich?” Basketball players may appear to be impossible to surpass to certain people because they are doing two things that most people can’t do: Making millions of dollars, and having fun enjoying life while doing so.  

Basketball is critized because of the lack of professionalism it displays. However, in reality, basketball players must deal with hard times as well. The average career is just 4 years (Fanatics). That’s a concern for the players because that means that they have only a few amount of years to earn enough money to care for their families for the rest of their lives. For example, a rookie makes it into the NBA at the age of 20 and signs a 4 year deal worth $10 million. He play 4 years and then his team releases him and he is suddenly out of a job. Now, at just the age of 24, his career in the NBA is over and he needs to figure out what he is going to do to provide for his family. Certainty, he cannot afford to live the extravagant lifestyle because the money will run out soon enough. He can choose to live out his life on the money he has earned from his four years, but it is unlikely that he didn’t spend most of it early on, thinking that he would last long in the league and would be able to acquire even more money. So in just a span of 4 years, an athlete can go from having a heavy income and a plan for the future to being jobless and searching for a way to continue making a living from basketball. This is an example of how a player’s salary may seem large at first but once the negatives outcomes occur, its all over. At any given moment, an owner can release a player, and he would no longer have a  job which is exactly the same as any other job. If their performance isn’t adequate, then the owner waives them and signs the next best player itching for a chance to make a name for himself. There is also a possibility that a player is traded at any given moment. A player could be forced to uproot his whole family without any say just because the owner felt that the package of players being received was greater than the player currently on the roster. This type of job movement does not come to other professions in this extreme of a way. People do not truly understand the dark side of the sports industry which can be compared to the worsts of almost any other profession in the world.

Knowing that teacher’s salaries are the ones who are most often seen as too low whereas athlete’s are too high, I decided to compare the two professions. Teachers have an average career length of about 40 years while, as previously mentioned, athletes average to about 4 years (Fanatics). In just New York City, schools were given a budget of $23 Billion from the Department of Education. The NBA had over $6 Billion to work with (Smith). Keep in mind, that the NBA is a world-wide company that has teams in both the United States and Canada and it is still working with $17 Billion less than the school districts in just New York City. The average teacher salary was set at $56,000 while the average NBA player’s salary was at $4 million (Lyons, Jr.). There are an estimated 3.1 million teachers in the America and only 450 players in the NBA. If someone was to combine the salaries of all the teachers in America ($56,000x3,100,000) it would be about $173 Billion whereas the total amount of salaries in the NBA is set a $2.5 Billion. Looking at those statistics, the conclusion made is that teachers are getting a significantly higher amount of money in total salary. The fact is that, there are so many teachers and so few NBA players that the individual salaries could never be equal. For a teacher to make $4 million, that would mean that the total amount of money spent on just teachers in the United States would be over $12 Trillion which is nonexistent in the world. 

The NBA works hard to promote their players as role models so that when people who aren’t fans of basketball see or hear about a player, they don’t just automatically hate or become envy of that player. One of their major initiatives was to create the NBA Cares program. What this program does is it brings NBA players to communities where the less fortunate live and sets up “Days of Service” in which the players get down and dirty building anything from houses to schools to playgrounds for those in the community (Nba Cares, YouTube). Since 2005, the players alone have given over $250 million to the NBA Cares foundation which then uses the money to pay for supplies and resources needed to construct these buildings in the struggling communities (Nba Cares). That is over 10% of the total player’s profit going straight to the charity just out of the player’s generosity. At no point does the NBA force or even ask their players to donate money. The players who donate just feel obligated to give back to the communities because they know that the money is better off going to them then just staying in their bank accounts forever. Not all players donate, and it wouldn’t be right to make the impression that all the players in the NBA donate and because of that, they deserve to be paid their high salaries. With that being said, when players combined to give over $250 million in just 10 years, people against the high salaries cannot judge the players who don’t donate and should instead congratulate the players who did donate. The NBA has a tradition that they carry out each year, and what it is, is they bring all 24 players who have made the two All-Star teams to a struggling community near the site of the All-Star Game. At the site, the players provide a day of fun, shooting baskets with the kids at the local schools, taking pictures and giving out gifts to the kids. What also takes place is the manual labor part that the All-Stars partake in. I showed a video of the 2017 All-Star NBA Cares day during my presentation and my goal was for it to show my peers what happens during the day. In 2017, it was in New Orleans and so they went to a community still trying to bring itself back to life following Hurricane Katrina (NBA Cares). 

The NBA is highly successful and with that success, they are fortunate enough to be able to pay their employees such high salaries. Just because some people are making more than a million dollars a year doesn’t mean that others should envy, rather they should just use that as motivation to succeed in their own lives. When people try to compare teachers and doctors to NBA players, its just not fair because its comparing two different professions, its like comparing apples to oranges. People don’t get annoyed at  people who wear suits and make a lot of money because they see those people as professionals who worked hard for their money. Well, NBA players are professionals, and their jerseys are their suits so no one should ever consider the players as anything less than they would consider other professionals in the work force. The NBA is a business that makes a lot of money with very few employees who happened to be very well-known to a lot of the public which puts their lives under the microscope of people and media members everywhere. The players are most certainty worth all they are getting paid!
