Cap space for each team

[tamburello]

yeah tamb, but we can go over the cap and get around things like that.
Look at new york, they are paying like 5 guys tons of money and they arent even on the roster.

if we lose Gerald and Matt... we had best be goin after Lewis no matter what it costs.

We have a chance at anyone we wanna go after, period. its all a matter of how much Bob is really willing to spend.

and yes we can wait till next year for okafor, but he would likely do what Wallace did and opt out. So if we sign him this year we have no competition... wait till next year and we will have to fight with a lot more teams than wallace is demanding to keep okafor.

New York is just another topic. They always used their MLE's and traded their expiring contracts for ongoing contracts. That inflated their cap. Also they had signed Allan Houston to an unrealistically huge contract.

Even if we lose Matt and Gerald, there won't have much time to convince Lewis I think. So what needs to be done, should be done immediately. Keep both Matt and Gerald and let Lewis be someone else's headache. And go after reasonable FA's you're targeting.

[dav7z]

Thanks TAMB it should help us all a lot about salery caps and exceptions. Even at that the team is still good shape cap wize. The signing of J-Rich still hasn't hurt us that bad.

[dnbman]

We're in o.k. shape, but that money can be eaten up QUICK.

Wallace is half of it. Carroll will be between 3-5. Dudley will be 1. That puts as at around 5M to sign 3 more players to fill in the roster. We definitely need a back up point, which will likely be a couple of million. If Bobby Brown is signed, he'll probably make the league minimum, which is like 700K.

That would put us right at the cap before we pay Okafor. The good thing is we lose lots of contracts next year. The only bad news is that if May and Felton pan out, we have to pay them the year after.

[dav7z]

We could easly give Crash his 10 milion five or six year. And give Carol 5 milion for four years . about like the six year 24 milion Jason Kopono just signed.
Dudley and Davidson will be cheap and i think we take one undrafted point. The other a cheap vet.
So we looking at about 53 or 54 milion.

[rallydurham]

Matt Carroll for anything more than $4 million is an awful signing, period.

You add guys like that after you have a team assembled, when you sign guys like that and eat up your cap space thats a HUGE mistake.

I like him just fine but we'd be stupid to offer him more than a 4 year $12-$14 deal. One could certainly argue that giving him ANYTHING other than the league minimum is a bad idea because it could potentially cost us a top flight free agent in subsequent years.

Let me re-iterate: You add players like Matt Carroll AFTER you've assembled a core team and you have no more cap space. You don't waste your cap space on players like him. This is a "soft" cap not a "hard" one, remember?


I can tell from this thread that not everyone here is that familiar with how the cap works, Ill try to help clarify some of the misunderstandings...

1) Okafor's extension wouldn't affect this years cap. Given the group of free agents available next season, Okafor wouldn't be that highly sought after really. We'd be smart to roll the dice and hope we can keep him for ~12 million rather than a max deal. SEriously, theres too much talent on the market and not enough cap space so I doubt anyone will have the capability to offer a max deal and if they did there would be plenty of other targets that are UFA's rather than RFA's. Really, there is no downside from waiting until next year and if Okafor gets injured there is clear upside. We should learn from the Blazers (randolph) and others mistakes the past couple of years and just wait.

2) We're not eligible to sign anyone to a Midlevel exception yet, that only comes into play once you're over the salary cap. We're not looking to spend a lot of money this year and it'd be stupid to take on anymore contracts until we give our guys some more time to develop and figure out what we really need.


3) We are a borderline playoff team next year so theres no reason to kill our flexibility chasing after free agents who won't vault us into contention. Just be patient, next year is the best free agent class of all-time and we'll be one of the only true players on the market. If we're coming off a 40 win season we'll have no problems adding a top commodity. And if we do suck again we'll at least get a good draft pick that we can use to trade for a top flight veteran. I mean damn there were guys like Stoudamire, Garnett, Marion, Ray Allen, O'Neal, Odom on the market this year and you guys are worried about Matt Fucking Carroll?

You have to gain some perspective. Carroll isn't taking us to the Championship level. THere's a reason the same teams are in the lottery every year. It's because they look for quick fixes like Speedy Claxton

[dav7z]

Rally i respect your post and agree with most of what you say. BUT Wallace is worth 10 milion if hes worth a penny. And Carroll is worth 4 to 5 milion being a key reserve coming off the beanch. If we dont offer him 4 to 5 milion some one else will . So it comes down to if we want to keep Wallace and Carroll. Thease guys are not playing for free. Who else thinks 10 milion is to much for Wallace or 5 million is to much 4 Carroll.

[dnbman]

Rally... While you're right about Carroll's real value, someone is probably going to pay him $4/y, especially since he's as good as Kapono who just got $6. It's tough to say if Carroll is worth it, but he did a lot for us last season and means a lot to the team. Is it worth an extra $500k-1M to keep a guy like that? I don't know. Ideally we get him at 2.7.

As for your evaluation of signing talent, with the trade Jordan made it clear that he wants to try and compete now. Whether we're ready for it is debatable. However, if our goal is the playoffs, we need a couple of more minor pieces to make that happen.

As for the big free agent class of next year, we can't beat any home team of any of those guys. Most of their teams built around them, meaning they're planning on putting big dollars into their franchise players. Also, a bunch of guys signed extensions last year that knocked them out of the discussion.

As for this year's available franchise guys, almost all of them were looking to go to an immediate contender. We don't fit that. Plus, we would have had to put up way more than we could afford to acquire them. Not to mention, it wasn't like people here were overlooking any of them in favor of Carroll. There were tons of conversations about all of those guys. There just weren't that many realistic deals to be had.

As for the MLE, that's debatable as well. I tend to agree that it would be better to wait another year to sign our role players. However, if the Cats want to make a real playoff push, they probably need to spend the rest of our dough and go ahead and use the MLE on an additional player.

As for picking up another star quality player, I don't think it's going to happen no matter how you look at it. Once we sign Wallace, that puts us at $44 M. We still have several guys to fill out the roster after that. We'll resign Okafor next year, and that will definitely put us over the cap. So, if sign Wallace, you're pretty much looking at Richardson, Wallace, Okafor, and other current players on our roster as a core, barring, of course, that we trade one of them.

[rallydurham]

I fully realize other teams will sign Matt Carroll for ~4-5 million. That's because it won't go against their salary cap so they really don't care.

Carroll WILL go against our cap so its pretty dumb to sign him. That's a great way to maximize our potential as a 40-45 win team incapable of making moves to get better.

Once we will fill our cap space up with TALENTED players thats when we can start offering MLE's to role players like Carroll. In the meantime, we can't do it because we aren't eligible to offer MLE's without exhausting our cap space first.

Here's what we're looking at for '08-'09

Richardson - $12.2
Wallace - $10
Felton - $4.1
May - $2.6

That leaves us with about $26-$30 million in cap space to take care of Okafor($12-$14), pick up Morrisons option ($4.15) and we'd still have $8-$12 million left to sign a pretty damn good free agent.

If we really wanted to get creative we could trade away our first round pick with either Morrison or May and we'd be looking at about $15 million with which we could sign an elite free agent.

Then we could extend Hermann.... figure out whether we wanted to retain May and Hollins...

And THEN have another $6 million to give a full MLE if needed, or perhaps a $1.8 million partial MLE....




If we decide to sign Matt Carroll this offseason then next year we'd have less than $1 million in cap space probably after you factor in the draft pick and we'd be relegated to ONLY a midlevel exception which we can't be sure Bob Johnson will be willing to pay for anyway.

It just doesn't make sense to lock up MATT CARROLL when there are guys like him on the market every single offseason. It would completely take us out of the running for the following players:

Josh Childress, Monta Ellis, Shaun Livingston, Kevin Garnett, Shawn Marion, Gilbert Arenas, Antawn Jamison.... and others