The NBA announced its All-NBA teams for the 2022-23 on Wednesday night, unveiling the First, Second and Third teams.
For many of this year’s All-NBA candidates, earning a spot on one of the three teams will simply bolster their career résumés, perhaps increasing their chances of being inducted into the Hall of Fame down the line.
But there are a handful of players who have a significant amount of money riding on the announcement. Those players become eligible for a more lucrative contract by making an All-NBA team.
The NBA’s Collective Bargaining Agreement typically restricts players who have six or fewer years of NBA experience from signing deals worth more than 25% of the salary cap. However, earning an All-NBA berth at the right time can make those players eligible to sign for up to 30% up the cap.
Similarly, players with between seven and nine years in the league are usually limited to signing contracts worth up to 30% of the cap, but an All-NBA nod can make them eligible to receive up to 35% of the cap instead.
We have more specific details on how Rose Rule deals and Designated Veteran contracts work in a pair of glossary entries, so you can check those out for more information. Here are the players who are the most financially impacted by this year’s All-NBA voting results:
Jayson Tatum (Celtics)
Tatum will only have six years of NBA experience at the end of this season, so he’s not yet eligible to sign a super-max extension. However, since he made an All-NBA team, he’ll have met the performance criteria for a Designated Veteran extension.
Players who have seven years of NBA experience and who made the All-NBA team in two of the last three seasons are super-max eligible. That means that his All-NBA nod puts Tatum in position to sign a five-year DVE (worth 35% of the 2025-26 cap) in the 2024 offseason regardless of whether he makes an All-NBA team next season, since he’ll have done so in both 2022 and 2023.
Jaylen Brown (Celtics)
Brown is member of the 2016 draft class finishing up his seventh year in the NBA and has a contract that expires in 2024.
Since he made an All-NBA team, he is eligible to sign a five-year Designated Veteran extension that begins in 2024-25 and starts at up to 35% of that season’s cap.
Ja Morant (Grizzlies)
Morant has actually already signed a rookie-scale extension, completing that deal with the Grizzlies last offseason. However, its exact value will look drastically different depending on whether or not Morant makes an All-NBA team tonight. Because he missed out, his deal starts at 25% of next season’s cap. Had he earned a spot, his contract would have started at 30% of the 2023-24 salary cap.
Based on a $134M salary cap, the difference is nearly $40M — he would have earned a projected $233M across five years if he had made an All-NBA team and about $194M because he did not.
Morant looked like a safe bet to earn All-NBA honors during the first half of the season, but an eight-game suspension for waving a gun in a Colorado strip club derailed his second half and made him more of a borderline candidate.
Pelicans forward Zion Williamson and Cavaliers guard Darius Garland also signed Rose Rule rookie-scale extensions last summer and would have had salaries worth 30% of the 2023-24 cap (instead of 25%) if they had made an All-NBA team.
Non-eligible candidates
To be eligible for a super-max extension worth 35% of the cap, a player can’t have been traded since his second NBA contract began. That rule will make Kings center Domantas Sabonis ineligible for a super-max deal even though he made the third team.
Several other All-NBA candidates, including Mavericks guard Luka Doncic, Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, and Kings guard De’Aaron Fox, could become super-max eligible down the road, but don’t have enough NBA experience to qualify yet. They would each need to make at least one more All-NBA team in a future season to become eligible, even though they all made an All-NBA team this year.
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