One of the many things that makes playing basketball for a living different from other lines of work is the radical pay transparency in professional sports. Salaries are not secret. NBA players come to an office in which colleagues, rivals and the fans who review their job performance know exactly how much money they make.
So three years ago, when the Dallas Mavericks signed Dorian Finney-Smith to a three-year contract worth $12 million, a cheap deal by NBA standards, it wasn’t hard to figure out why he was paid less than hundreds of players.