NBA Salary Income Inequality since 2005

Now that the NBA season is well underway, I thought I would look at how equal (or unequal) NBA salaries are over the last few years.  To do that I collected the NBA salary data from ESPN and calculated the Gini coefficient for the league as a whole.  Results are listed in the table below by season, the number of players (n), the Gini coefficient and the total salary for all players in the league.

Season	n		Gini		Total
2005-2006	394		0.4917		$1,619,154,926
2006-2007	409		0.5006		$1,697,883,876
2007-2008	415		0.5161		$1,817,073,513
2008-2009	413		0.5053		$2,002,564,767
2009-2010	428		0.5260		$1,972,670,023
2010-2011	450		0.5366		$1,964,987,905
2011-2012	501		0.5500		$2,013,125,239
2012-2013	541		0.5601		$2,062,073,682
2013-2014	391		0.5409		$1,786,979,523
2014-2015	431		0.5294		$1,903,052,600
2015-2016	407		0.5017		$2,126,853,179

As you can see the NBA has been fairly unequal in the distribution of salary among its members, but over the last few years, salary inequality has been decreasing in part reflecting the increase in average salary over the last few years.  For comparison purposes, the US Gini coefficient for 2014 is 0.480.  Below is a chart of the Gini coefficient in the NBA since the 2005-2006 season.