Thanks to the NBA's skyrocketing TV contracts and smaller rosters, a basketball career can be quite lucrative compared to other major sports.

This is especially true for the stars of today and the athletes who played a large chunk of their careers between the late 1990s and the 2011 lockout. Those years led to some large contracts for players we might not consider among the all-time greats.

Here is a look at the 25 players who have made at least $165 million, according to data collected from Spotrac and Basketball-Reference: