stopnpop wrote:
You're confusing caps here. There's a soft and hard cap. The Wolves can resign Gomes (and maybe Bassy) and still not hit the hard cap that brings about the lux tax if they decide to keep their 2nd rounders. They are going to get rid of 3 (maybe 4) of their free agents. This has been clear since the beginning of the year. The status quo on a 22 win squad isn't something to lose too much sleep over. Those 2nd rounders are bargain basement players with 1 year deals. They are gold to this front office in that they allow them to either pick a Euro who won't come over for a year or two, trade to a cost-conscious team in the late 1st, or pick a player who can fill a roster spot for a year or two on the cheap a'la Craig Smith and Chris Richard.
I'm not confusing caps, I fully understand the cap situation. The NBA uses a soft cap with a tax at a certain salary amount. The soft cap was at $56m last year like I said and we have $55m in salary right now. Depending on what the salary cap increase is, we only have a few million to spend in additional salaries. While the salary cap can be exceeded under certain circumstances(free agent exceptions, rookie exceptions, mid-level exceptions, etc...), the salary still counts against the cap.
For example, if the cap was set at $59m, we have $4m to work with. That $4m is taken up right now by free agent money used by exceptions until the free agents are signed by us, another team, or renounced. If we resign Gomes to $4.5m a year, we can go over the cap by $.5m but we have then met the salary cap and cannot sign a second round pick other than on the mid-level, if possible. We can still sign a first round pick under the rookie exception but second round picks are not included in the rookie exception. We can also resign Smith, Snyder, and Telfair via early bird and larry bird exceptions but it still puts us over the cap and therefore preventing us from signing others.
Granted, we can draft a Euro and just not sign him and still maintain rights to him until we are ready to bring him over. We can also trade those seconds for a first and use the rookie exception to sign that draft pick.
So does that make it an order of operations issue? As in... the wolves need to sign the rookies THEN sign free agents who have their exceptions.