Five years. That’s roughly how long the average NBA career lasts, according to Davon Norris, lead author of a Social Forces study that Ohio State publicized in March 2021. His team followed 2,611 players whose careers began in or after the 1979-80 season, through the end of 2016-17. Norris put the short span down mostly to teams, which tend to cut players before the players would choose to leave.
So the honest answer to the headline question is that players rarely pick the moment. The contract calendar picks it for them, and this fall several of those dates land within two weeks of each other. First-round picks from the 2023 draft have until 6 p.m. ET on Monday, Oct. 19, to sign rookie scale extensions, the day before the 2026-27 season tips off. Option decisions on younger rookies follow in early November.
Around those deadlines sit the moments nobody schedules, like an Achilles tear in a preseason game. Behind all of them sits a second question, about what a player actually builds, and two very different careers, Junior Bridgeman’s and Kevin Durant’s, answer it from opposite ends.
Two guaranteed seasons start the first clock
A first-round pick’s first contract is short by design. Article VIII of the 2023 collective bargaining agreement says a rookie scale contract covers two seasons, with a team option on the third season and a second team option on the fourth. Pay comes largely from a table. Draft position sets the scale amount, and the salary has to land between 80 and 120 percent of it.
The options run one season at a time. A team must exercise each one by Oct. 31, and the agreement pushes that deadline to the next business day when it falls on a weekend, which is why this year’s date is Nov. 2. A player learns at the start of his second season whether a third exists, and at the start of his third whether he gets a fourth.
The league tries to get the money conversation in before any of that. The NBA and the players’ union first ran the Rookie Transition Program in 1986, and by 2023 it was a mandatory four-day orientation. Financial literacy had stayed among its fixed topics, according to NBA.com’s report on that summer’s session, and Purvis Short, the union’s chief of player programs, had been involved almost from the start.
Hearing about planning isn’t the same as doing it, though. Two guaranteed seasons look like a long time from the draft stage, and the curriculum can only put the question on the table.
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Extensions and injuries pull the date forward
The second contract is where the question turns concrete. Under Article VII, a first-round pick can extend his rookie deal from the end of the July moratorium until 6 p.m. ET on the day before his fourth season opens. A player who signs by the Oct. 19 cutoff knows roughly what the next several years will pay. One who doesn’t plays the coming season with nothing signed beyond it.
Injuries don’t wait for a window. On Monday, Oct. 5, Philadelphia center Ariel Hukporti tore his Achilles in a preseason game against the Knicks, and an MRI the next day confirmed the tear, TalkBasket reported. He had joined the 76ers this offseason on a one-year contract worth $3.4 million, so the injury lands in the only season that deal covers.
Short deals turn every injury into a planning event as well as a medical one. On a one-year contract, the plan rests on the next deal rather than the current one, and a torn tendon in October pulls that conversation forward.
The 60 percent figure deserves less trust than it gets
Any conversation about player finances runs into one number sooner or later. In March 2009, Sports Illustrated’s Pablo Torre wrote that an estimated 60 percent of former NBA players are broke within five years of retirement. The figure has been repeated for 17 years. It was framed as an estimate, and a later attempt to measure something like it looked at a different league.
That attempt came in 2015. Economists Kyle Carlson, Joshua Kim, Annamaria Lusardi and Colin Camerer tracked every NFL player drafted from 1996 to 2003 and counted bankruptcy filings, a narrower test than being broke. The share rose steadily to 15.7 percent by 12 years into retirement, and the authors noted that their result was quite different from the widely cited Sports Illustrated numbers.
Their sharper finding matters more for timing. Bankruptcy rates didn’t move with how long a player lasted or how much he was paid in total, so a long career and a big contract gave little protection by themselves. That argues for starting the plan while the checks are still arriving. The caveat cuts the other way, too: it’s a football sample, and the basketball figure everyone quotes still has nothing comparable behind it.
Bridgeman and Durant started at opposite ends of a career
Bridgeman, the No. 8 pick in 1975, played 12 NBA seasons, 10 of them with Milwaukee, and only after retiring began buying restaurants. He later recalled working the line at a Milwaukee Wendy’s, making sure customers got what they ordered, after his playing days were over.
His company, Bridgeman Foods, operated more than 450 Wendy’s and Chili’s restaurants in 20 states until 2016. In 2017 it bought Heartland Coca-Cola Bottling Company, which made him an independent Coca-Cola bottler. He bought Ebony and Jet in 2020 and 10 percent of the Bucks in 2024. Forbes put his net worth above $1.4 billion in February 2025, a month before he died at 71.
His advice to other athletes was blunt. Owning a franchise isn’t like sitting on the bench collecting a paycheck, he told them, and a franchisor’s training on running a restaurant won’t teach you to run a business, Franchise Times reported. The NBA often brought him in to talk to younger players about money and business, and so did the players’ union he had once led as president. Commissioner Adam Silver said Bridgeman “served as a mentor to generations of NBA players and athletes across sports who were eager to learn from him about what it takes to thrive in the business world.”
Durant started from the other end. In 2016, nine seasons into his NBA career, he and his manager Rich Kleiman founded Thirty Five Ventures. The firm now calls itself Durant’s family office, home to investments in more than 100 startups, and its sister company Boardroom has a sports holdings arm that has bought into teams including Paris Saint-Germain, the Philadelphia Union and Gotham FC.
A restaurant counter and a family office look nothing alike, and the timing differed as much as the businesses did. Bridgeman shows a late start can work, and the football bankruptcy data is the reason not to count on repeating it.
Gaming deals lead back to a two-tier free-to-play design
Gaming came later, and the players who moved into it took their time. In July 2018, Stephen Curry and Andre Iguodala joined a $37 million funding round for Swift, the parent company of the esports organization Team SoloMid, in a round led by Bessemer Venture Partners with $25 million of its own. Bryant Barr, president of Curry’s company SC30, told ESPN the investment came after six to eight weeks of discussions.
They weren’t the first. Jonas Jerebko had led a group that acquired the Renegades in 2016, and Durant was a minority owner of Vision Venture Partners, the parent of Echo Fox. An esports team competes inside a game another company owns, so backing the team means backing that game’s business model too. Team SoloMid’s game was League of Legends, which Andy Dinh was playing when he founded the team in 2009.
When Riot Games announced on July 14, 2009, that League of Legends would be free, it built the game around two kinds of points. Influence Points came from playing, and Riot Points could be bought. Spending bought visual options, not an advantage. The game cost nothing, and payment stayed optional.
That two-tier design travels well beyond esports, and Spree’s Sweepstakes Casino runs a two-coin version of it. Gold Coins can be claimed free or bought, but they’re for play only and can never be redeemed. Spree Coins can’t be bought at all. They come free through routes such as daily coins or a mailed-in request, and under the sweepstakes rules they’re the coin that can be redeemed for prizes. No purchase is necessary, and its terms restrict play to adults 18 or older, or older still in places that set a higher age of majority.
From an adviser’s chair, the parallel with Riot is the part worth noticing: in both systems, money never buys the tier that carries the most weight, whether that is power in a match or a coin that can be redeemed. That parallel describes how the model is built. It says nothing about whether any company running it is worth owning, and it isn’t a way for the people playing to add to their savings. The same terms describe the games as intended for entertainment only.
The union waits at the exit, which often comes early
The end of the last NBA contract isn’t always the end of basketball. Mario West played four NBA seasons and then spent time with teams in the Dominican Republic, Italy, the Philippines, Mexico, France and Argentina before going back to Georgia Tech as director of player personnel.
In January 2020 the NBPA named him director of the union’s Off The Court transition program, which Antonio Davis had helped launch in 2017. The program was set up to build plans around professional development, financial literacy and health for life after the NBA. “As a former player myself, I know how difficult it can be, mentally and physically, to walk away from a game you devoted your whole life to,” West said when he took the job.
The labor deal puts money behind the same exit, though only for education. Since the 2023-24 season, each eligible player has been able to build up as much as $41,667 a season in tuition and career transition benefits, toward a lifetime ceiling of $125,000, with reimbursements capped at $62,500 in a calendar year. Two-way players can earn service toward it under conditions the agreement sets.
None of that tells a player when to start. The calendar does, and in the next four weeks the Oct. 19 extension cutoff and the Nov. 2 option deadline will make the call for players from three draft classes at once. When the declined options show up on the transaction wire, read each one as the day a planning clock started.
