Dumb question: I'm LeBron and I want to go to Houston. Other than the pride issue, how much does my salary mean to me? In other words, am I making so much in endorsements that I don't really care?
Mike
I thought about this. What's that salary $ to Lebron? His net worth is around 400M... But maybe he hopes to purchase a team down the line. He's still pretty far from Ownership money.
It's also the principle, especially as a businessman.
Just throwing out hypotheticals, but what happens to Houston if LeBron goes there?
Team value goes up 20%-30% maybe? That's a $440 to $660 million increase based on the recent $2.2b sale (granted ownership doesn't actually get this unless they agree to sell). But there's also team revenue which might go up maybe $100m annually? Operating Income goes up $25m annually maybe?
That's all money that goes to ownership. Why should LeBron take a discount so ownership can reap all the rewards?
(Just pulling these SWAGs off of what I see from the Warriors here, here, and here, sure it's more complicated then this, especially considering some of these past numbers may have been impacted by the NBA's new tv deal, remember just hypotheticals)
Do players make more money themselves if their team wins the champs? Or is that not going to be significant for a player like Lebron?
I don't think it's significant for most players, unless winning the championship just happens to correspond with your emergence into the national spotlight (a la Steph Curry).
I think the impact of endorsements as well as potential endorsement dollars tends to be extremely overestimated by fans.
Outside the top 2-3 NBA players, you make more from your NBA team than you do endorsements. And outside the top 10-15 best and most marketable players you're making peanuts (by pro athlete standards), lucky to crack $2 million in annual endorsements. Throwing some examples out here, Jimmy Bulter made $900k in endorsements in one of the biggest markets in Chicago last year. DeAndre Jordan made $800k in 2016 in LA. Brook Lopez made $500k in NYC. Then you have guys you'd might be really raking in the big bucks, guys like Chris Paul, Blake Griffin, and Carmelo Anthony, huge names, in tons of commercials, playing at their peak in the NBA's biggest markets, and they've never earned over $9m a year in endorsements.
But anyway, back to LeBron. He's been the NBA's top endorser for the last like 10 years. Maybe he has incentives in his Nike contract (the main source of his endorsement money) to win a championship (or MVP), but I'd guess it's relatively minor (for LeBron, like say $1m bonus), it's not going to surpass the multi-million dollars he'd leave on the table by taking less than a max deal. At this point, I really don't think there's anything LeBron could do to significantly increase his marketability value.
Topic: Lebron to Houston talk heating up (Read 7424 times)