30 richest players in the NBA

18

Nene

Center, Houston Rockets

Here is a strange one. Yes, Houston Rockets center Nene has made the 18th most money in his NBA career of any active NBA players. The Brazilian center was drafted No. 7 overall by the New York Knicks in the 2002 NBA Draft and has made a whopping $123,109,944.

Nene’s draft rights were traded to the Denver Nuggets, where he spent most of the next decade making a killing as a so-so center. He signed a three-year, $6.3 million rookie deal with the Nuggets in July 2002. Nene would receive a qualifying offer in 2006, making him a restricted free agent.

Then things got interesting in how Nene made most of his wealth in Denver. In 2006 free agency, he would sign a six-year, $60 million deal with the Nuggets. He would play out five of those six years for the Nuggets. Then the Nuggets lost their minds in summer 2011.

Nene would terminate the last year of his deal with the Nuggets in June 2011 to sign a whopping five-year contract with the Nuggets worth $67 million. Denver had almost immediate buyer’s remorse, shipping him to the Washington Wizards in a January 2012 trade.

Washington would be on the hook for the bulk of that massive salary. The Wizards would renounce his rights in summer 2016. Nene hit unrestricted free agency to sign a one-year deal with the Houston Rockets for $2.9 million.

Denver not having a clue what it was doing in 2011-12 helped make Nene a very wealthy man. Washington paid over $60 million for a player under contract it didn’t even negotiate. That has to be one of the strangest salary dumps one will ever see.