David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…And really starting to be an early precursor to tilting the balance of power and the economics to that of a fair one, which is closer to where we are today, where the players are able to actually shine and benefit from being the ones that are actually attracting all the attention. Obviously, we can argue about whether that's true enough today, but to this point, it really hadn't been the players who were economically benefiting at all from this rising popular sport. No, totally. We'll get much more into modern economics today, but after this—this is pretty incredible—the top players like Wilt and Russell start negotiating much harder for better contracts and more pay. In 1968, when Wilt signs with the Lakers, he signs a landmark five-year deal for $250,000 per year, which is a lot of money in 1968. I think inflation-adjusted, it's like $2 million or so, so nowhere near the deals today. But here's the crazy part. The top paid Major League Baseball player at the time was Willie Mays, who made $125,000. Will is getting twice as much money as the top baseball player in the world, even though the NBA is still 10X smaller than Major League Baseball. Pretty incredible. It also just goes to show how much the baseball owners were screwing the players at the time. How did that work out? Is it because the Lakers owners had a bunch of money or why were they willing to spend so much more on a player when their viewership was way smaller?…

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