Skin wrote:One thing I don't understand is Pek's contract. Don't you guys have another year before you need to give him a new contract? In any case, I still don't see how Pek, Budinger, a non-lottery 1st rounder and Redick take you over the luxury tax, especially when you're subtracting D-Will's contract.
Pek is a restricted free agent after this season. We plan to keep him, so we need to match another team's best offer.
As for going over the lux, here's the numbers:
$14,693,906 Kevin Love
$10,219,420 Andrei Kilenko
$4,687,000 JJ Barea
$4,320,000 Luke Ridnour
$3,678,358 Ricky Rubio
$3,066,667 Alexey Shved
$2,690,875 Greg Steimsma
$2,180,000 Dante Cunningham
$884,293 Malcolm Lee
$46,420,519 MINNESOTA TOTALS
$11,000,000 Pekovic new deal?
$4,000,000 Buddinger new deal?
$1,000,000 MIN/MEM new deal?
$7,000,000 Redick new deal - must outbid all offers
$5,150,000 MLE
$74,570,519 TOTAL 2013 SALARY
The lux may go up, but the last few years it's been $70.3 mil.
Your next step would be to eliminate contracts, but even that's tough. Steimsma's not guaranteed, but we'd need "somebody" as a back-up center. Pek is looking like he may get an offer for more than $11 mil, and outbidding all offers for Redick might be north of $7. Your trade may require us to trade Ridnour or Barea and demand that we get an expiring, which is also limiting. We could not use the MLE, but it wastes an annual opportunity to add talent to the team without giving up anything but money -- a better alternative than trading an asset like Williams.
