Salaries of Lacrosse Players

In 2009, the average pro lacrosse player made a little over $16,000 a season. As I talked about last week, most players have other jobs outside of lacrosse. Information on NLL salaries is rather hard to come by; I couldn't find any information on the highest salaries in the league, but I have heard from sources that the value is currently $37,000. Franchise players make 25% more than the league maximum, which would be around $46,250.

Let's take a look at how this compares to other professional athletes. Here are some average annual salaries for other North American team sports:

Basketball – $5 million
Baseball – $2.8 million
Football – $1.75 million (NFL)
Hockey – $1.5 million

Many hockey players like John Tavares, Joe Nieuwendyk, and Gary Roberts (among others) played lacrosse growing up. I have heard that many of them, particularly Nieuwendyk, were better at lacrosse than hockey, and Nieuwendyk has even said that he liked lacrosse more than hockey. But the average lacrosse player would have to play for 94 years to make what the average hockey player makes in a year. Can you blame them for choosing hockey over lacrosse when it came time to make a career choice?

According to The Hockey News, John Tavares (the hockey player) makes $900,000 per season. This means that in each season, Tavares makes slightly less than the amount Uncle John has made in his entire 20-year career with the Bandits – and that's assuming that Tavares the elder has been a franchise player the entire time (which he hasn't) and that the franchise player's salary have been unchanged at $46,250 the entire time (which it hasn't).

Just for fun, let's look at the extremes.

The highest paid hockey player is Brad Richards, who makes about $12 million per season. This is equivalent to 750 years at the average NLL salary and 259 years at the franchise player's salary. If Richards plays in all 82 games, he'll make $146,341 per game, enough to cover an NLL franchise player for over 3 years. But let's go higher still.

Alex Rodriguez is the highest-paid baseball player and makes about $32 million per season. This means that A-Rod makes almost seven hundred times what the best NLL players make. In 2011, he only played in 99 games so we'll use the numbers from 2005, when he played in all 162 Yankees games while earning about the same amount. He had 605 at-bats and 91 walks plus a few HBPs and such, so let's say around 700 plate appearances. This means he made about $45,714, or about the same as an NLL franchise player's annual salary per plate appearance. In a game where A-Rod went 1-4 with a walk, he made as much money as a franchise NLL player makes in five years. And that's one game. He plays in 162 of them. Also remember that this was from a year where he actually played in 162 games. In 2011 he only had about 420 plate appearances, so his per plate appearance number is up to $76,190.

If each of the nine NLL teams has 24 players, the total salary paid to the entire league in a season would be around $3.46 million. If A-Rod starts with $0 on January 1st, he's made that same amount before spring training starts in February.

Of course, these are all meaningless comparisons since the scales are so far off. The four major sports have multi-billion-dollar TV deals and make millions more from merchandising and such. The NLL doesn't. The upcoming 2012 season is the first in NLL history where they have a TV deal that will actually make them money, and we're definitely not talking billions. The circumstances are entirely different and as such, the salaries are not comparable. I work in the tech industry, so this is like comparing my salary with that of Bill Gates and wondering why his has so many more zeroes on the end of it than mine.

For NLL salaries to come anywhere remotely close to those in MLB or the NHL, the league would need to make far more money than they do – and we're talking an order of magnitude or two. Raising ticket prices wouldn't work, since they'd have to raise them to the point where nobody would go. The only real possibility is to grow the popularity of the league to the point where they are getting Colorado-like crowds at every arena, and they do make millions from the TV contract. They've been trying to do this for 25 years and while they are making progress, we need to be realistic and accept the fact that nobody will ever become a millionaire playing pro lacrosse. If you're a Brodie Merrill or Paul Rabil, making at or near the top salary in both the NLL and MLL plus sponsorship deals, you can probably do pretty well, but Merrill and Rabil are easily the exceptions, not the rule. And even these guys are making a fraction of Tavares' salary with the Islanders – and he's making a fraction of what Brad Richards is pulling in – and he's making about a third of what A-Rod makes. And if you include sponsorships, A-Rod makes a third of what Tiger Woods makes.

And after all that, Tiger Woods' total net worth is less than one percent of that of Bill Gates. Geeks rule.