Kevin Séraphin shocked: “I saw his payslip, it depressed me”

All players are not paid the same way in the NBA, which means that we sometimes see quite staggering salary differences between teammates. Guest of the First Team recently, Kevin Séraphin notably shared a crazy anecdote about a former athlete he met at the Wizards.

His name is less high-sounding than those of Tony Parker, Boris Diaw or even Nicolas Batum, but Kevin Séraphin has still been able to spend seven seasons on the floors of the big league. Never holder (34 games started out of 423), the French interior therefore essentially came off the bench by bringing his energy under the circle with a peak of 9 points and 4 rebounds in 2012-13. A passage quite correct in the NBA, therefore.

It was for the Wizards that he played most of his matches in the United States, he who spent five years there before flying to the Knicks and then the Pacers. The opportunity for him to rub shoulders with stars like John Wall or Bradley Beal, but also a certain Rashard Lewis. If the latter has marked him so much, it is above all for his crazy financial emoluments as he recently admitted on the set of the First Team :

Kevin Seraphin flabbergasted by Rashard Lewis’ salary

“He was taking $900,000 every 2 weeks! You know me, it depressed me. And from that, I said to myself “Mind your business” ????

???? Kevin Seraph (@smartsavagee) on the relationship to money in #NBA In @Clutch_Winamax pic.twitter.com/D8gRtBi14E

— First Team (@FirstTeam101) June 8, 2023

The relationship with money in the NBA, you lose it after a while. You enter a world where there are just astronomical sums. Once we had the chance to see Rashard’s payslip, it was incredible. I will never forget. I have never seen anything so high! It was $980,000 every two weeks. Month, it depressed me. From that, I said to myself: “mind your own business”. Don’t go looking actually, because that’s how it is. That taught me the last time I looked at a guy’s payslip.

Almost a million dollars every fortnight? It is easy to understand the dismay of the former big man of the Blues, especially since he has won “only” 20 million greenbacks in seven years. But this comparison is even crazier when you know which player we’re talking about, Lewis being considered one of the worst contracts in the history of the big league.

Very good in the early 2000s, especially in Seattle where he sent more than 20 points per game at 40% from afar, Sweet Lew hit the jackpot in 2007 with an XXL deal: 118 million over six years! A rotten contract that he wandered from the Sonics to the Magic of Dwight Howard, before landing in the capital. He never lived up to such a huge check, but his financial future was largely assured.

Rashard Lewis was a great player when he signed that massive contract, but he was clearly a shadow of his former self when Kevin Seraphin became his Wizards teammate. Not yet accustomed to seeing such sums, the Frenchy logically almost turned a blind eye when he saw the winger’s bank account!