Salary Cap Explained

Now everyone wants to keep Julius... where the haters at?

Alright, now I'm here to try and explain all this because some people either don't understand how the cap works or are just giving out wrong information.

First, here is all the salary we've committed going into this offseason.

Now, when we look at salaries and free agents, there is one aspect called cap holds. This is how much money a free agent is counted towards our overall cap and allows us to keep any form of their bird rights. When we renounce their rights, that's when they are completely cleared from our books. These are the players we have in our cap holds.

Now, at the first minute of free agency, all of those guys as well as first round picks and incomplete roster charges will make up our salary cap which would be well in excess of over $130M. Realistically, we would renounce Brook, KCP, Frye and IT to give us the maximum amount of flexibility. I'm going to also assume we let go of Ennis, but keep Zu and TB. This would be how much money we would have committed before we start looking at free agents.

At $54M in committed cap space, we have less than $46M in cap space to work with. Signing PG allocates about $30M of that cap space, which leaves us with $16M to work with. We would need to sign the remaining $16M before we sign Randle's contract using bird rights to go over the cap. Here's where I hope Brook takes a paycut and stays with the team.

Now, if we were to stretch Deng's contract, it would give us an additional $10.5M in space, bringing that total cap space to around $56.5M. This would still not be enough for two max contracts, barring any pay cuts etc. We don't want to do this and you'll see why below.

Now let's look on to the 2019 offseason. Can we sign a second max?

Let's assume we signed Randle to a $20M contract.

The salary cap for the 2019 offseason is projected to be at $108M, and our projections have us at a little more than $14M in room. This is the year we absolutely have to try and get rid of Deng's contract. He's on the last year of his contract. If we get rid of this contract, we would have over $32M to get a max player in the 2019 offseason. Whereas if we stretched it, it would only give us an additional $12.5M, totaling around $26M. However, issue is we need to get rid of it during the offseason, and you typically don't see teams trading for expiring contracts that early.

My personal opinion: I think a core lineup of Zo/PG/BI/Kuz/Randle/Hart, hopefully Zu/TB and some other bench pieces or more late first round steals is enough to compete. I don't believe we need Lebron. I have never been on the Lebron train. He's 33 and father time never loses.