NBA 2018-19 Season: Average player salary for every NBA team

#6-4

The Rockets have done a phenomenal job of building their roster up from scratch. Starting in 2012

Miami Heat - $131.5 million

Highest-paid player: Hassan Whiteside ($25.4 million)

Average annual salary: $8.95 million

The Miami Heat are stuck between a rock and a hard place. While the $26 million they're paying to Chris Bosh doesn't count towards their salary cap, they're still paying the luxury tax for a roster in which the biggest standouts (Goran Dragic and Hassan Whiteside) have never been named to the first list of an All-Star team.

None of their current contracts (with the exception of Tyler Johnson's poison-pill contract) can be labelled as bad outright, but they still end up having to pay the luxury tax for a team that has barely been above .500 since 2014.

Houston Rockets - $135.29 million

Highest-paid player - Chris Paul ($35.65 million)

Average player salary - $9.6 million

The Rockets have done a phenomenal job of building their roster up from scratch. Starting in 2012, when they acquired franchise player and reigning MVP James Harden in a trade from then-finalists Oklahoma City Thunder, the Rockets have barely put a foot wrong in terms of handing out contracts.

They will be looking to go two steps better than the Game 7 Western Conference Finals appearance that they managed in 2018, although their task has become monumentally harder due to the Warriors' offseason moves

Toronto Raptors - $141.22 million

Highest-paid player - Kyle Lowry ($31 million)

Average player salary - $9.67 million

The Raptors are run by one of the wiliest front office officials in Masai Ujiri, who was a huge coup for the organization as he's proved time and again in the past 5 and a half years.

Ujiri has turned around one of the worst expansion teams in league history into a perennial playoff team and pulled off one of the ballsiest trades of this past summer to swap DeMar DeRozan for Kawhi Leonard.