Why Steph Curry is only the NBA's 79th-highest paid player
Steph Curry is the NBA's back-to-back MVP, its best point guard and the brightest star on a wildly popular team.
He's also the league's 79th-highest paid player.
It's late July and the NBA's summer free agency frenzy has cooled down. With the dust settled, Curry's Warriors contract is stranger than ever. Spotrac.com, a site that tracks salaries in pro sports, puts Curry's wage for the 2016-17 season at 79th in the NBA.
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Role-players -- Khris Middleton, Ricky Rubio and Arron Afflalo, for starters -- earn millions more than him. Al Horford -- a fine player but certainly no Steph Curry -- makes more than double Curry's salary.
Hell, Timofey Mozgov -- a center who averaged 6 points per game last season -- just signed a contract for that will pay him $4 million more than Curry next season.
Steph Curry, victim of circumstance
What gives? There are two factors at play here making the back-to-back MVP the league's best bargain.
First, the NBA salary cap just went up -- waaaay up, to quote Riley Curry quoting Big Sean. Last season's salary cap (the limit teams can spend on player salaries without having to pay an extra tax to the league) was $70 million. Next season's salary cap will be just over $94 million.
Why? The NBA recently signed a lucrative new broadcast deal -- $24 billion over nine years. We detailed the bizarro world of NBA labor relations here, but the upshot is that players who hit free agency this summer stumbled into a jackpot. (Same goes for next summer, when the salary cap is expected to take another big leap.)
SB Nation broke it down well earlier this month: If a team committed nine percent of its total payroll to a role player under the old salary cap, that player would have earned just over $5 million during the 2012-13 season. But under next year's cap, the same percentage of a team's total payroll comes out to a salary of $8.4 million. Top players can earn as much as $26 million next season.
Curry, meanwhile, will make $12 million next season. He's no role player. He's the back-to-back MVP and a Vine legend, to boot!
But when Curry signed his current four-year, $44 million rookie-contract extension with the Warriors in 2012, the NBA was in a different salary era. And Curry was a different player.
A few years later, and a whole new player
He wasn't yet Steph Curry, global celebrity and household name -- in fact, his current level of greatness was predicted by no one even as recently as 2012. Three full seasons into his NBA career, Curry had yet to crack 20 points per game. Moreover, a series of ankle injuries had cast doubt over his longterm prospects.
Back then, four years of Curry for $44 million seemed a relatively good deal all around. Today, it seems preposterous -- especially after this month's free agency fever dream.
"I had to make a conscious decision and remind myself over and over [to let it go]," Curry told Yahoo Sports' Adrian Wojnarowski last season of his small contract.
This is the bizarro world of NBA economics that we referenced earlier: A player making $44 million over four years can have legitimate claims of being underpaid.
Weep not for Curry, however. He's a marketer's dream, and Forbes tabbed his off-court earnings at $12 million a year in February. He even has an equity stake in Under Armour, the upstart sneaker brand for which he is the public face. Rest assured, more money is flowing into the Curry household than you or I would know what to do with.
Curry's big payday to come
But remember what we said about the NBA salary cap jumping again before the 2017-18 season? Next summer, Curry will be eligible to sign a new deal.
KA-CHING!!!
Tim Kawakami of the San Jose Mercury News reported last year that, according to projections of the 2017 salary cap, Curry will be able to re-sign with Golden State for up to $172.5 million over five-years.
That is, to use a financial term, a shit-load of money. It would make him among the league's highest-paid players.
But for now, Curry remains way down the list, a back-to-back MVP retained by Golden State at a bargain-bin price.
Sam Laird is Mashable's Senior Sports Reporter. He covers the wide, weird world of sports from all angles -- as well as occasional other topics -- from Mashable's San Francisco bureau. Before joining Mashable in November 2011, his freelance work appeared in publications including the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Slam, and East Bay Express. Sam is a graduate of UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, and basketball and burritos take up most of his spare time. Follow him on Twitter @samcmlaird.
