The NBA Billionaire's Club

October 12, 2026

Each season's salary as a share of every salary paid in the league that season, times the 2025-26 league payroll ($5.60 billion), added up over the career. Paid is what they actually made; peak % is their best single season's share of the league's payroll; WP is career regular-season Wins Produced. Seasons where we're missing much of the league's payroll are left out (Ewing: 16 of his 18). Full leaderboard.

The Boxscore Geeks is back, boxscoregeeks.com! Using what should be an old and outdated model on player performance, we have, in my mind, one of the best spots for viewing basic statistics on what wins games in basketball and which players are doing it or did it.

Years ago Dr. David Berri wanted a simple metric of player performance in the NBA to compare to wages. The question was, do teams pay for the right things, and the shocking answer is ... no. In what oddly became a contentious subject, merely checking the rule book, seeing which stats mattered, and seeing how those stats related to players was both effective and infuriating at the same time.

Almost 20 years later, shockingly, the same metric still works well, but we're working on improving it, and improving how we show it to you!

A few simple parts:

• We now have WNBA numbers! This dataset still needs some love salary-wise, and official position-wise, but WNBA Wins Produced is here.
• We have older data and ABA data back to 1974! Older NBA and ABA data isn't as complete. Dave has made models to handle gaps that we can fill in, but until then, we're most of the way there.
• We now use play-by-play splits for position and team adjustments where we can.

A brief update on the last point - Wins Produced is a box score statistic that has a very simple idea that in basketball, the stats the player records are largely their own. And this simple premise appears to be both true, and oddly powerful. Sports like baseball can mean a player's production can vary based on their team, which league they're in, which field they play on, but basketball? It's no surprise LeBron James has won Finals MVP with three different franchises.

That said, there are teammate adjustments related to assists, rebounds, and opponent shooting. Assists and rebounds happen, so based on your team's rebound and assist levels, your individual assist and rebound numbers might be better or worse than face value. Think about a group of people splitting lunch, but not everyone is a good tipper.

Opponent shooting outside of blocks can't be directly attributed to an individual easily from the box score. Dave's method for this was to split this "by minute" for players on a team. And this model is shockingly simple, and, I'll stress, not a big driver in player performance. We now have this down to the actual minutes the player was on the floor, so if a team's backup unit was bad at defense and the starters weren't? This is now handled. I will likely revisit this paragraph more later, but I really want to stress, with regard to what wins basketball games, this part is not as big as you'd think.

Ok, with a new engine to play with though, I decided to revisit Wins Produced's roots and go to player pay. We have salary data back to the '80s and examining which players were paid right, overpaid, and underpaid has been a staple of the "Wages of Wins" crew forever.

So let's take it to 11. An easy modification to player salary is "inflation adjusted": how much would a player making $1 million in the '90s make today? And I added that. But a slightly more fun one is as follows - take a player's salary for their year, compare it to the league payroll of their season, and then ask how much they'd have made over their entire career if they were paid that percentage of the current league payroll for every year they played. And again, same page!

And that gives us four players that are special, the Billionaire's Club! Let's review:

• Patrick Ewing - had one of the smartest agents ever, who made sure he was a top-4 paid player. As such, not only did he get a huge contract before max player salaries, etc., it stayed high for a long time. I'm fairly certain I'll revisit this topic at a later date.
• Kevin Garnett - literally got the rules changed for getting the biggest contract at the time from the Minnesota Timberwolves in 1997 (six years, $126 million).
• Shaquille O'Neal - also helped get the rules changed by signing a huge deal with Los Angeles as an unrestricted free agent before max contracts were a thing!
• LeBron James - an amazing name on this list since he had to deal with all the rule changes from above. Also worth noting: he helped change the rules too as his sign-and-trade to Miami resulted in future stars not having a shot to make as much money in sign-and-trades.

Now, with how the cap has exploded, there's no doubt we'll get true lifetime billionaires soon, but I figured this list was just cool.

There's a lot more to be done with new data, our salary data, and more. As I still say on the site, we're still making sure our data and methods are clean, so treat it as a beta. But it's good to be back!

-Dre