LeBron for $4 Million a Year: The Best Value Contracts in NBA History
LeBron James is signing with the Philadelphia 76ers for two years and $8 million, with a player option in the second year. He made more than $50 million last season. Even at 41, this seems like crazy value.
I wanted to know how crazy, so I started ranking the offseason’s signings by a metric I’m calling surplus cap points — the gap between a player’s estimated fair salary and what he actually signed for, as a share of the salary cap. Then I kept going and built a second leaderboard for the best bargains of the salary-cap era, which is where Curry’s $44 million extension and Chauncey Billups’ mid-level deal live.
At that point it wasn’t a blog post anymore, it was a data app. So that’s what it is now:
Both leaderboards are there — the 2026 offseason and the all-time steals — with the methodology, the sources, and all the caveats. The short version: LeBron at $4 million a year is the value signing of the offseason at 15.8 surplus cap points, more than double the next-best deal. And if he plays to even the conservative projection behind that number, the contract lands in the same neighborhood as the bargains that underpinned the Bulls and Pistons championship cores.
One housekeeping note: I’m keeping this blog for writing. The interactive stuff — this one, the Bible apps, whatever comes next — lives at apps.lawrencewu.net, and posts here will just point to it.