NBA Draft 2025: Projected Contracts For Cooper Flagg And Other First-Round Picks
Duke’s freshman phenom went No. 1 and can earn nearly $14 million next season—not including endorsements. It could be the beginning of a billion-dollar career for the 18-year-old.
If there was any doubt that Cooper Flagg would be the first player selected in the 2025 NBA Draft on Wednesday night, it was dispelled within minutes of the event kicking off.
Shortly after NBA Commissioner Adam Silver announced the 18-year-old star from Newport, Maine, as the Dallas Mavericks’ selection at No. 1 overall, Flagg walked across the stage at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, exuding a quiet confidence that suggested he was right where he belonged. After all, Flagg has had scouts hyperventilating over his seemingly limitless talent for years—all through high school and across his lone season at Duke University, where he won the Naismith National Player of the Year Award as a freshman and led the Blue Devils to an ACC championship and a Final Four berth.
Now, Flagg is getting his reward for those exploits. As the first pick in the draft, he will likely be guaranteed more than $60 million in salary over the first four years of his NBA career. And if Flagg, who has been compared to past teen phenoms LeBron James and Victor Wembanyama as a franchise-altering No. 1 draft choice, fulfills that promise, his rookie contract will look like a bargain.
Based on the NBA’s rookie salary scale, Flagg can expect to earn almost $14 million in his first season of professional basketball, a smidge below the $14.5 million average salary of the 354 players in the league already signed for the 2025-26 season, according to contract database Spotrac.
The top pick in the draft is slotted for $11.5 million, but teams are allowed to surpass that value by as much as 20%, or dip below it by the same percentage. At least the last two top draft picks have come in above the slot value: Wembanyama, taken by the San Antonio Spurs in 2023, and Zaccharie Risacher, who joined the Atlanta Hawks in 2024, after both played professionally in France. (Wembanyama, now 21, pulled in $12.2 million in his rookie seasonthe first of a four-year deal worth more than $55 million, including options. Risacher, 20, slightly exceeded those figures, collecting $12.6 million in 2024-25 salary as part of his four-year, $57 million contract.)
NBA rookie salaries haven’t always worked that way. The league first implemented a predetermined pay structure for rookies in 1995, a year after No. 1 pick Glenn Robinson followed a stellar senior season at Purdue by signing a ten-year, $68 million contract with the Milwaukee Bucks. In the first draft with the new guidelines, which severely restricted agents’ ability to negotiate salaries for incoming players, Maryland’s Joe Smith was slotted to earn $2 million in his first year with the Golden State Warriors, according to RealGM. (The NFL followed suit by capping rookie compensation in 2011, leaving 2025 top pick Cam Ward to sign a four-year, $48.8 million contract with the Tennessee Titans—less than the six-year, $78 million deal Sam Bradford got from the then-St. Louis Rams 15 years earlier.)
For first-year players in the NBA, pay has climbed quite a bit in the decades since Smith’s name was called, with the rookie scale rising alongside the salary cap, which is tied to league revenue. In March, the NBA reportedly informed teams that it expected the salary cap to increase 10% to $154.6 million for 2025-26, from $140.6 million this past season.
Under that projection, which is typically finalized before free agency opens in July, Flagg could earn nearly $63 million on the court through the first four seasons of his NBA career. The league’s collective bargaining agreement guarantees the first two years for first-round picks while teams are granted consecutive options for the third and fourth years. Salaries also incrementally increase throughout the life of the contract.
Flagg won’t be the only rookie cashing in, either. Every first-round selection in this year’s draft is projected to earn a seven-figure salary, although each slot has a diminishing value. The Nos. 2 and 3 picks, if maxed out, could receive $56.1 million and $50 million across the life of their four-year deals. Meanwhile, the 30th selection in the first round is projected to make $14 million over the same duration, with $2.7 million coming in the first season.
Yet even with tens of millions coming Flagg’s way, this first deal represents the tip of the financial iceberg for the newest Maverick. He has already built an impressive collection of off-court partners, working with New BalanceFanatics and Gatorade. And as media rights fees skyrocket—last year, the NBA signed a new 11-year, $76 billion broadcast package—the potential to earn on the court seems limitless. In 2026-27, Warriors guard Stephen Curry is slated to become the first player with an annual salary exceeding $60 million, and Boston Celtics forward Jayson Tatum will break the $70 million barrier in 2029-30.
James leads all NBA players with career on-court earnings that will cross $580 million this season, according to Spotrac tracking—but he will also be earning at least $50 million for the first time in 23 NBA seasons. Tatum, by comparison, is hitting that milestone in his ninth year.
According to Spotrac estimatesFlagg could one day be eligible for a five-year, $359 million supermax extension that starts in 2029, and then another five-year, $509 million deal that concludes the year he turns 32.
Or to put his opportunity another way, in the words of New Balance marketing executive Naveen Lokesh, “Cooper is slated, if he does what he’s supposed to do, to probably reap over $1 billion on the court.”
