The San Antonio Spurs and Victor Wembanyama have agreed to a new five-year, $252 million contract extension, according to ESPN, and Wembanyama is leaving some money on the table in doing so.
Wembanyama's new deal is reportedly a maximum rookie-scale contract extension with a player option in the fifth season. There were iterations of the deal that could have included the 30% supermax escalators, bringing it to $303 million. Instead, Wembanyama chose the 25% maximum to provide some financial flexibility for the franchise with players like Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper still on rookie-scale contracts but in line for their own extensions down the road. Castle is extension eligible next summer; Harper will be in 2028.
For example, per ESPN's Bobby Marks, Wembanyama will take $8.7 million less ($43.5 million) in Year 1 of his deal than he could have ($52.2 million). Had he remained on his rookie contract, Wembanyama would have made $16.9 million next season.
Spurs family, I’m here to stay.
— Wemby (@wemby) July 10, 2026
Whatever it takes🖤
Wemby following the Jalen Brunson blueprint?
As if this guy isn't popular enough in San Antonio, now he's taking less money so more can be doled out to his teammates, most notably Castle and Harper -- whose first non-rookie paydays will both eventually overlap with Wembanyama's new contract.
It's the Jalen Brunson blueprint, and it just won the New York Knicks a championship in five games over Wembanyama and the Spurs. As was well chronicled at the time, Brunson signed a $156 million deal in the summer of 2024 when he could've signed for $269 million a year later.
It looked like a $113 million sacrifice on paper, but with Brunson structuring a player option into the fourth year of the deal, which he will surely opt out of for a new contract beginning in 2028-29, the savings were actually closer to $37 million for the Knicks.
Nonetheless, it was a hell of a sacrifice. Brunson could get hurt between now and 2028, or he could even wait until 2029 and sign for more than $400 million. If that happens, he will make his money back by hitting his free agency a year earlier.
But his production could fall off by that point. Pushing your biggest possible payday down the road so the team can put a championship roster together is pretty selfless stuff. And that's what the Knicks did. With more money freed up, the Knicks traded for Mikal Bridges and then extended him for $150 million, re-signed OG Anunoby for $212 million, and traded for Karl-Anthony Towns and his $220 million.
When the dust settled on this past year's championship, Brunson, despite being the best player and Finals MVP, was the third-highest-paid player on the team. Without his willingness to give up all that guaranteed money, the Knicks wouldn't have been able to pay all those other guys while staying under the second apron, which team owner James Dolan just refused to cross even after winning the title.
This is when championship teams start having to break up. They win, and everyone gets corresponding raises. The team gets too expensive, and salaries start getting trimmed. When the Celtics won it all in 2024, Jaylen Brown was making $31.8 million. The next season, his super-max extension started and suddenly he was making $49.2 million. Last year, that number increased to $53 million, coinciding with the start of Jayson Tatum's own super-max at $54.1 million.
Neither of those guys took the Brunson discount, and that meant bye-bye to Jrue Holiday, Al Horford, Kristaps Porzingis, and Luke Kornet. And now Brown is gone in large part because he makes too much money.
The Spurs haven't won a championship yet, but we can all see it building toward that end, perhaps as soon as this coming year. Wembanyama doesn't want anything to get in the way of that happening, and he's willing to put his money where his mouth is.
It's easy to brush that off and say, "Big deal, this dude's going to make a billion dollars in salary alone by the time his career is over," but that's not really the point. He doesn't have to do it. Many other people, in fact most people, would not do it.
But as we move forward, at least under this current Collective Bargaining Agreement, you have to wonder if this will become more of an unspoken expectation for stars to take less money than they could make. Not to put more in the pockets of even richer owners, but to preserve roster-building flexibility when the alternative is breaking up championship teams, or worse, teams that haven't gotten to a championship yet and need more time together or one more player to get over the hump.
It's a sticky subject. There are probably a lot of players who look at what Brunson did and what Wembanyama is about to do, and feel it puts pressure on them to do the same. Everyone's situation is different. If you're later in your career and this is your last chance at a big contract, or you don't have the sort of appetite for risk that is required to postpone paydays, you shouldn't be expected to do this. At the same time, if more of your competitors do start doing it, you're going to be at a real disadvantage.
