Giannis Antetokounmpo becomes the beneficiary of another giant contract in the NBA

Before the start of the next season in the NBA, a new gigantic contract was signed. Greek forward Giannis Antetokounmpo has agreed to a three-year deal worth about $186 million with his Milwaukee Bucks starting in 2025, possibly making him the league’s highest-paid player. However, it is not surprising that its teams are willing to pay their stars that kind of money, given that the NBA’s annual revenues have already reached $10 billion, and the economic situation in the championship is constantly improving.

The information that Giannis Antetokounmpo, on the eve of the start of the next NBA championship, extended his current agreement with Milwaukee was reported by all North American sports resources. The Greek player’s agent Alex Saratsis confirmed her to ESPN.

We are, in fact, talking about a new agreement that will come into force after the current one expires, in 2025. Its conditions are extremely remarkable.

Giannis Antetokounmpo is one of the NBA’s top celebrities. Selected 15th overall in the 2013 draft by Milwaukee and not considered a basketball player with tremendous potential at the time, he quickly made himself visible as a superstar with unique talents. By the age of 28, Antetokounmpo has amassed an impressive collection of prizes. He was twice recognized as the league’s most valuable player, in 2019 and 2020, and was repeatedly included in its symbolic teams and among the participants in the All-Star Games. And in 2021, Milwaukee won the championship title primarily thanks to its amazingly jumping and sharp Greek forward.

Last regular season, Antetokounmpo again had excellent personal statistics. His performance, for example, went off scale at 31 points on average per match. True, Milwaukee failed in the playoffs, losing to the Miami Heat in the first round.

Giannis Antetokounmpo, of course, was already on the list of the highest paid players in the NBA. According to Basketball-reference, his salary for the upcoming season will be $45.64 million. According to this indicator, he shares places from seventh to tenth with two Los Angeles Clippers basketball players – Kawhi Leonard and Paul George, as well as with the transfer to his team from the Portland Trail Blazers with guard Damian Lillard. Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors currently leads the classification with $51.92 million.

However, the contract extension will give Antetokounmpo a boost. In total, the value of the new contract is estimated at $186.64 million. In other words, his average annual salary for a forward will be $62.2 million.

At the same time, no one in the basketball community was particularly surprised by Milwaukee’s generosity. It’s all about the economic situation in the NBA, which allows such contracts to be signed. Explosive growth in wages was recorded a year ago. And this phenomenon was expected. The NBA, which, like other top American championships, seriously sank during the coronavirus pandemic, recovered amazingly quickly from the consequences of the crisis and in 2022 was pleased to report that its total revenues for the season for the first time reached the grandiose mark of $10 billion. At the same time the league had no doubt that this was a stable trend, and therefore, before the last championship, it raised the salary cap (the maximum amount of contract payments to players from the club’s application for the year) from $123.7 million per team to $136 million. Moreover, in contrast to, for example, from the NHL, the NBA uses a soft ceiling rather than a hard one: it allows for excess, subject to the payment of the luxury tax. This circumstance is taken advantage of by most clubs that do not experience a shortage of financial resources.

It is noteworthy that this offseason the league has already concluded several contracts that would have seemed astronomical only relatively recently. Let’s say, in July, guard Jaylen Brown signed a five-year agreement with the Boston Celtics for $300 million, despite the fact that he is actually not a superstar of the highest caliber. And in August, the Los Angeles Lakers extended the contract with their forward Anthony Davis on terms, as ESPN assures, “virtually identical” to those that Milwaukee offered Giannis Antetokounmpo.

Alexey Dospehov