Ring culture dominates the GOAT debate when it comes to the NBA so we’re trying to add a bit of nuance to it with an exercise in which we look into the spending of the various teams in which league legends played. (Obviously, it’s a bit harder to win titles when your team’s owner is not spending big bucks).
We limited this exercise to the 23 players who made the NBA75 list and debuted after 1990 (which is as far as our salary archive goes) to get a fair gauge of how much the teams of legends were spending in relation to the rest of the league. We did that without factoring in the luxury tax, but rather just straight-up combining the salaries of the players for each team each year.
Below, we rank those 23 players based on much their teams spent relative to the league average during their time in the league.