I did not know about that new rule. Thanks
However, it only slightly changes my question. What good young player could we absorb if we had our MLE? Or better yet why would any team want to dump a good young player in that salary range? And it seems we are only interested in young players at the moment.
I like that we can dump "small salaries" but it doesn't make us better, it just saves Jody money.
Now if you already are a contender and you need help from an older vet to get you over the hump, then it would be a huge advantage, but it is also unlikely that many contenders have their MLE.
Yes ideally it would be good to have the MLE available, but I am not losing any sleep over not having it.
I am sure you can come up with examples of why it would be advantageous, (Maybe to help facilitate a trade?) but at this point, we need a star player, not role players. I am not sure how the MLE will help with that.
it doesn't have to be a 'good young player'
there are two major changes I'm focused on in this discussion. One is what we're talking about here in the MLE now being like cap-space or a TPE for trade purposes
the other is the minimum team salary rules. Under the old CBA's a team just needed to reach the minimum before the season ended, and the only 'penalty' was they had to pay the NBA the differential between their payroll and 90% of the salary cap
but the penalties have changed under the new CBA. Teams have to reach the salary floor by the
beginning of the season. If they don't, the rules erase any unused space a team has below the floor. But that's not all, for the rest of the season that team can not make any trade that reduces team salary; none (
even if they first perform a trade that gets them above the floor).
AND, they do not get to share in luxury disbursements. Those are significant penalties...
...meaning that teams with off-season cap-space will be doing everything they can to reach the salary floor before the season starts. I think we may see some surprisingly large 1 year contracts. And some UFA's are going to get major paydays. But more than that is that teams are not going to be able to finesse their cap so well that they end up with exactly 10% of the cap as cap-space. The coming season the cap is projected to be 141M. That would mean the maximum cap-space any team can carry into the season would be 14.1M. Meanwhile the MLE is 12.8M. But assuming no team hits the salary floor perfectly, it could mean that during the season and approaching the trade deadline, other than a couple of large TPE's, the largest single blocks of
exceptions/cap-space around the league would be unused non-tax-MLE's.
and for teams looking to shed salary to get under either of the two aprons, or get out of the tax, or just save millions in tax payments, those teams that have the full MLE could end up collecting decent draft picks for simply taking on an unwanted contract. Which would greatly benefit Portland....assuming they weren't so damn close to the tax line with the Vulcans circling overhead