PARIS—LeBron James on the fast break. Kevin Durant in the mid-range. Stephen Curry swishing threes from the South of France.
When the U.S. men’s basketball team takes the court at the Olympics, it would be hard to blame other teams if they looked across the floor and decided to jump into the Seine.
Team USA is so loaded that coach Steve Kerr could bench his starters, play only his backups and still have the best roster anywhere on the planet. The last time there was this much talent in the same locker room was in 1992, when Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird were on the Dream Team.
But there’s a difference between the two best Team USA rosters ever assembled—and it’s a big one.
In fact, it’s close to a half-billion dollars.
When the players moonlighting on this year’s Team USA return to their day jobs in the NBA, they will make a combined $504 million in salary, making this team not just the glitziest or scariest squad in Paris, but something else altogether: the highest-paid team in basketball history.
The total salary of players on the Dream Team was $35 million—or less than the individual salaries of most players on the 2024 team.
Ever since NBA stars began spending their summer vacations in red, white and blue, they have been the richest athletes at the Olympics. But these days, the sums of money are so ginormous they look fake.
In 2016, the average salary on Team USA was $20 million. In 2021, it was $25 million. Now it’s $42 million.
All of which makes what they’re doing this summer even more surprising. When they suit up to play for their country, it’s the one time the NBA’s biggest names are playing for free.
“It’s an incredible honor to represent the United States,” said James, a four-time Olympian who waved the U.S. flag on a massive bateau mouche during the Opening Ceremony.
But the Americans are very much aware that no amount of money can buy a gold medal. Their salaries become irrelevant as soon as they cross the ocean, since NBA basketball and international basketball are completely different sports—and there are lots of teams that would love to humiliate the $500 million superteam.
And the only thing more shocking than how much money they make is how vulnerable the Americans have looked before the Olympics.
In one of their exhibitions, the U.S. had to squeak out a last-second win over South Sudan after trailing by double-digits in the second half. That is, mighty Team USA nearly lost to a country that doesn’t have a single indoor basketball gym —or any recognizable NBA players . They easily could lose to Canada, Germany, France or any team they might encounter in the knockout round.
“This is not 1992,” Kerr likes to remind his players, referring to the Dream Team’s stampede to gold.
But it would still be a huge upset if this U.S. team comes home from Paris without a gold medal.
That’s not just because the financial disparity is gigantesque . So is the talent gap between the Americans and other teams—at least on paper. Almost everyone on the roster is an NBA All-Star. Even the team’s role players, like Jrue Holiday, are the best in the world at what they do. James likens Team USA to “the greatest AAU team of all time.”
NBA players are not the only Olympians worth more than the fencers and judokas. But tennis legends, champion golfers and other highly compensated professional athletes have their base pay tied to their performance.
If Carlos Alcaraz skips a tournament, he doesn’t get a check. If Scottie Scheffler misses the cut, he goes home without a penny.
Stephen Curry? He makes $55 million next season even if his ankles turn into foie gras.
Today’s basketball players have become fabulously wealthy as lucrative media deals transformed the NBA’s economy over the past decade.
But there’s another reason this particular team has so much money: because it’s pretty old.
Team USA’s roster is stacked with veterans, including some players who were in their primes four and even eight years ago. And the longer that players have been in the NBA, the more money they’re allowed to make. James (39), Curry (36) and Durant (35) defined an entire generation of basketball—and they have the salaries to prove it.
Their teammates are not exactly walking around Paris on a budget, either. Anthony Edwards is the youngest player on this team at 22 years old. Before long, he will have earned more in NBA salary than Michael Jordan made in his entire career. In the season after his first Olympics, Jordan was paid $555,000. Edwards pockets about that much in a single game.
Even the last guy and lowest-paid player on the team can afford a trip to Hermès. Derrick White once went to a Division-II college that gave him a stipend, not a scholarship, and he worried about paying off student loans . This summer, he agreed to a four-year contract worth about $30 million per year.
Their NBA teams will breathe a sigh of relief when their most valuable investments return to work, and the risk of a catastrophic injury has only increased with the size of the league’s paychecks.
But players can just as easily get hurt in a summer pickup game. They also have pretty good insurance policies: Every member of Team USA has at least two years and $100 million left on his deal.
And no player has ever had the financial security of Jayson Tatum, who recently signed an extension that pays him $314 million through 2030—the richest deal in the history of the league.
For Team USA, he’s coming off the bench.
Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com and Robert O’Connell at robert.oconnell@wsj.com
