Above The Rim with DH 12 (DR)
By Joël Pütz | Sports journalist
On paper, NBA players are living the good life while salaries continue to rise. But all this wealth can also weigh on you on a daily basis, especially in relation to those around you. Dwight Howard explained it perfectly on his podcast.
It’s honestly mind-blowing when you look at the current salaries of the stars NBA. This season, it is Stephen Curry who will be the best paid in the big league with no less than 55 million dollars and even 59 million next year. And that’s nothing compared to the sums that could fall in the coming months…
We know, for example, that Luka Doncic could receive up to 73 million greenbacks per season, on his next contract. Even crazier, some expect that Victor Wembanyama will one day become the first player to sign a lease worth one… billion dollars, no less. With the NBA raking in more and more money, players are obviously taking advantage of it with ever thicker wallets.
If he arrived a bit too early having had some of his best seasons in the 2000s, Dwight Howard also has nothing to complain about financially. In total, the pivot has even accumulated 246 million dollars during his career, a very nice sum… which however causes him some problems on a personal level, as he recently explained on his podcast:
Dwight Howard’s Big Confession About His Career Earnings
A lot of people have said to me, “Dude, you don’t really care about me. You say you love me, that we’re family, that we’re cool, that we’re friends and when I need you, you don’t want to give me money”… That doesn’t mean not to say that I don’t care about you or that I don’t love you. It’s just that I deserved this money. Do you know how hard I had to work to get what I got?
And you want your piece of the pie because you don’t want to work and you want me to give it to you. And when you go home night after night having to deal with things like that, it kind of discourages you from wanting to be around people. You want to be a loner.
A rather sad speech which echoed that of Brandon Jennings, guest of the podcast.
The problem with having a lot of money is that sometimes those around you also want to take advantage of it. Enough to give players the impression of being nothing more than a cash dispenser and inevitably, this takes away a large part of the pleasure of the game. Suffice to say that this type of problem is not about to disappear.
Dwight Howard made a very good living during his NBA career, but having so much money pushes him to want to isolate himself at times so as not to have to deal with the opportunistic requests of those around him. We can understand this, since after all it was he alone who worked hard to accumulate such a fortune.
