If athletes help turn franchises into multibillion-dollar assets, should their compensation end with their salary?
Stephen Curry recently gave the Golden State Warriors a discount.
He could have signed an extension worth roughly $136 million. Instead, he agreed to two years and $116 million, leaving more than $20 million on the table partly to give the Warriors greater flexibility to build around him.
There is nothing wrong with that decision. Curry has already earned hundreds of millions of dollars, wants to finish his career in Golden State, and values another chance at a championship more than he values maximizing every remaining dollar.
But there is something strange about how normal we have made this conversation.
When a superstar refuses to take less, fans can call him selfish. When he accepts a discount, it becomes proof that he cares about winning.
Rarely do we ask why the sacrifice should come from him in the first place.
Salary Is Not Ownership
The Warriors were purchased for $450 million in 2010, one year after Curry was drafted. In Sportico’s 2025 valuations, the franchise was worth roughly $11.33 billion.
Curry did not create that entire increase.
The NBA itself has become dramatically more valuable. New media deals have lifted the whole league. Golden State owns Chase Center and the surrounding Thrive City development. The Bay Area is one of the wealthiest markets in the country. Smart executives, coaches, teammates and business decisions all contributed.
But Curry’s contribution was not zero either.
Four championships, a dynasty and one of the most recognizable athletes of his generation fundamentally changed what the Golden State Warriors meant, both as a basketball team and as a global brand.
The question is not whether Curry deserves $10 billion.
It is why the system treats his contribution to the long-term value of the franchise as economically irrelevant once his salary has been paid.
NBA players are hardly exploited in the conventional sense. Under the collective bargaining system, players collectively receive roughly half of Basketball Related Income. That is an enormous share of the money generated by the league.
But revenue and wealth are different things.
Players participate in the money basketball generates today.
Owners also hold an asset that can continue appreciating for decades after the players who helped build its value have retired.
That distinction becomes especially important when those same players are asked to take less.
The Price of Competitive Balance
There is an obvious response: the Warriors cannot simply tell ownership to spend another $20 million instead.
The NBA’s salary cap is designed in part to create competitive balance. For 2026-27, the cap is $164.961 million, with increasingly restrictive rules kicking in at the first and second aprons.
That is a legitimate goal.
Without controls, the richest teams could simply overwhelm smaller markets.
But it creates a peculiar situation.
The NBA restricts how much teams can spend in the name of parity. It limits what even its greatest players can earn through maximum salaries. Then, when a contender needs additional flexibility, one solution is for the superstar to voluntarily surrender even more compensation.
Competitive balance matters.
But should its cost fall so naturally on labor?
There may be another way to think about it.
The Dynasty Dividend
Imagine that the NBA and its players’ union eventually created a form of long-term compensation tied to franchise appreciation.
Call it a Dynasty Dividend.
It would not be ordinary ownership. Players would not suddenly receive voting rights or permanent stakes in multiple franchises.
Instead, after an unusually long period with one organization, perhaps eight years, a player could begin earning a small, progressively vested interest in the value he helped create.
The exact threshold could be negotiated in future collective bargaining agreements. The principle matters more than the number.
Performance would matter too.
A franchise cornerstone should earn more than a bench player, but the system would not have to be reserved only for MVPs. A player who spends a decade consistently performing above an agreed positional or replacement-level baseline has contributed something real to the organization.
The percentage could increase according to longevity and impact.
And crucially, the calculation should not simply use raw franchise appreciation.
If every NBA franchise doubles in value because of a new television contract, a player should not receive credit for something that happened league-wide. Market size would also need to be normalized so that a star in New York is not automatically treated as more valuable than an equally transformative player in Oklahoma City.
Instead, the system could focus on some measure of excess appreciation: how much a franchise grew beyond reasonable league and market expectations during the player’s tenure.
Would that formula be complicated?
Of course.
So is the salary cap.
So are luxury taxes, Bird rights, escrow, designated veteran extensions and the second apron.
Professional sports have never rejected complicated formulas when both sides agree that what they are measuring matters.
The real question comes before the math:
Should this kind of contribution count at all?
From Employee to Partner
The idea is not completely foreign to basketball.
Philadelphia 76ers star and NBPA vice president Jaylen Brown argued earlier this year that players should be able to build equity alongside owners as franchise values rise. He compared NBA players with employees and executives at major corporations who can receive equity after years of service.
Unrivaled, the women’s 3-on-3 basketball league, has already gone further. Players receive equity alongside their salaries, with the original equity allocations influenced by factors including contract length and professional accolades. As of August 2026, players collectively remained the league’s largest equity group, with their equity pool valued at nearly $200 million.
That does not mean the NBA can copy the model tomorrow.
It does mean salary is not the only imaginable relationship between an athlete and the business he helps build.
Other industries already understand this.
Senior lawyers become partners. Startup employees receive stock options. Executives are compensated partly through equity because their work is supposed to increase the long-term value of the company.
Sports has some of the most identifiable value-creators in business. A handful of athletes can become inseparable from the organizations they represent.
Yet they remain almost entirely on one side of the line between labor and ownership.
Perhaps that line deserves another look.
Choice Is Not Obligation
None of this means Curry made the wrong decision.
Money is only valuable because of what it can buy. At this stage of his career, another championship, better teammates and the chance to retire as a Warrior may genuinely be worth more to him than another $20 million.
That is his choice.
The uncomfortable part is the expectation.
A player can spend fifteen years generating wins, ticket sales, television audiences, merchandise, sponsorship opportunities and cultural relevance for one organization. The franchise can become vastly more valuable during his tenure. Ownership keeps that appreciating asset.
And when the team needs financial flexibility to chase one more championship, we can still turn toward the player and ask:
How much are you willing to give back?
The Dynasty Dividend does not need to be the answer.
Maybe the formula would never work. Maybe a future collective bargaining agreement will invent something entirely different.
But zero should not be accepted as the only possible number simply because it is the number sports has always used.
If an athlete spends the best years of his career helping build something that will remain valuable long after he leaves, perhaps there should eventually come a point when we stop seeing him only as an employee.
Perhaps, after enough years and enough value created, he has earned the right to become a little bit of a partner too.
References:
https://www.nba.com/news/stephen-curry-warriors-extension-sept-2026
https://www.reuters.com/sports/warriors-lead-sporticos-nba-team-valuations-1133b–flm-2025-10-16