tester551 wrote:Myth wrote:cucad8 wrote:Tax relief. Flexibility. Gives Portland a 22 and 27-29 million dollar TPE. It's not just to use cap space to sign FAs always. The TPEs could be used to absorb deals to gain assets to help with the rebuild potentially.
Exactly. If the plan was to use cap for free agency, it would be a bad plan as Norm pointed out, but it does work for flexibility in trades by taking on more money than we give out. A recent example is this is how we traded for Jerami Grant without sending any players out. Plus, Portland is expected to cut costs anyway as the team is not good enough to justify paying the tax.
A) Portland only needs to cut ~$10M to avoid the tax. Not $50M.
B) The primary benefit of the TPE is if you have draft picks that you can send out as compensation to the other team (ie - Grant to Portland). This trade gives Portland the TPE, but does not give them the 'currency' of tradable picks for transactions in the future.
Portland is donating talent to the trade and only gets back a coupon that will expire worthless in a year. Terrible trade.
C) Teams under the tax are allowed to take on extra salary in trades until they hit the cap.
TPEs are for teams over the cap to have such an exception when they trade a player to a team under the cap. I haven't done the math, but assuming this puts Portland under the cap by cutting out $50M, then as long as they are under they have additional flexibility in trades. Over the cap is when you start seeing that 125% plus $100,000 rule, and then 110% if over the 2nd apron. This goes on and on without that "expiring coupon" you mentioned until they are over the cap themselves.