Brooklyn Nets forward Cam Johnson has not played college basketball since 2019 when he led North Carolina to an ACC championship along with guiding the team to the Sweet 16 in the NCAA Tournament. Johnson, who is currently in his sixth season in the NBA, may not be going back to college anytime soon, but it sounds like he isn't done getting what he's earned during his collegiate days.
In May of 2024, there was a settlement reached in the House v. NCAA lawsuit that would require the NCAA's national office to make payments of more than $2.7 billion to Division 1 athletes that played in college from 2016 to 2024. It seems that the final step towards getting those athletes, including Johnson, their payments could happen on Monday and Johnson echoes the sentiment of many by saying that the athletes earned the money.
"It’s not free, we worked for it," Johnson said, per Alex Schiffer of Front Office Sports. "It’s on principle," Johnson continued. "I feel like there’s plenty of information around it. I feel like I heard about it on multiple fronts whether it was college teammates, classmates, NBA teammates, friends, parents."
As part of his feature on the issue, Schiffer interviewed multiple NBA players regarding one of the landmark cases that has changed the way that college sports are operated, especially with the recent legislation that allowed NIL (name, image, and likeness) to be a legal component of the sport. While players like Johnson are not necessarily hurting for the settlement money, they can still stand to gain plenty from what the NCAA earned off of their play years ago.
Per Schiffer, Johnson is expecting to earn somewhere from $100,000 to $120,000 as part of the settlement due to the time that he spent at Pittsburgh and at North Carolina, especially since he entered the NBA at a time where he couldn't take advantage of the NIL era. As Johnson said, the issue of getting the settlement money is on principle more than anything else and it seems that most NBA players feel the same way.
"Nobody checks their [messages] constantly, especially not for stuff we don’t know that’s coming," Nets forward Noah Clowney, who could gain around $80,000 in settlement money, said when explaining how happy he was that forward Jalen Wilson made sure that he filed paperwork to be part of the settlement. While the Nets are worried about finishing the 2024-25 season strong, they are also making sure that they get what's rightfully theirs.
This article originally appeared on Nets Wire: Nets' Cam Johnson speaks on NBA ...
