Median salary of National Basketball Association player is $2.3 Million - NBA Update
The lockout is not coming to an end and so do the rumours surrounding it. The players and officials have not yet finalized their decisions on the disagreements for the new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA).One main issue of
this multi-billion dollar industry is of raising the average salary of a player to $5.15 million. Further negotiations are to be done on issues like Rookie salary scale, drug policy, National Basketball Association Development League, conduct and discipline
rules, and pensions.
A little mathematics will help to understand this issue. Group data can be easily measured in many ways. By adding all the values and dividing them with the number of people will give an average or mean. The exact middle value
when they are arranged from smallest to largest is called the median.
Mean is more widely used as it is easier to calculate and understand. But what most of us are not aware of is the fact that median is much accurate when it comes to a set of numbers with extreme values.
Talking about the round off figure i-e $5 million; it’s a large sum for anyone to earn. Definitely, there is an influence of the salaries of the superstars or the players who are paid this much to perform like a superstar, on the
inflated figure.
An average player of NBA who does not possess any extraordinary skill is earning less than the aforementioned figure. Currently, if the 2009-10 season is taken into account, the median salary is estimated to approximate value of
$2.33 million. This is 46 times more than a household earns in U.S.A but its far less than the average of the maximum salary.
Executive director of National Basketball Players Association, Billy Hunter, has disputed both the accounting methods and figures shown by the league. The players are of the view that the NBA has its own accounting and has come
off a season of record revenues leading to bigger player payrolls and the highest salaries caps ever. So the mean is favourable for the owners as it shows the overall costs. On the other hand, players will prefer the median salary that will reflect a middle
class earning.
"It's the median salary that's more important," NBA agent Bill Duffy said. "Look at the Miami Heat as an analogy here: You've got three guys making $17 million and probably six guys making $1.2 [million]. So that's a little misguided
that average salary."
"We use [average] because it's the most commonly used measure and best reflects the amount of compensation that the NBA provides to players across the league. In addition, it's the measure that both we and the union agreed upon in the CBA." an NBA spokesman
said.
The accountants and lawyers will know the nitty-gritty of these statistics and hopefully they will ensure effective policy for the next CBA.
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