RealGM

How is it that Miami was able to fill out their payroll to 66.5 mil when the cap came in at 58 mil? I know it's a soft cap, I know about exceptions allowing teams to go over, but I didn't think a team in Miami's situation would be allowed to use exceptions to go over the cap. Can someone shed some light for me? Thanks!

http://hoopshype.com/salaries/miami.htm

I haven't checked the site but there are a couple ways to do that.

One, they took advantage of Joel Anthony's cap hold. He made less than a million last year so his cap hold was between 1 and 2 million. Once they filled their cap, they could go over to resign Anthony and they did as he's making 3.3 million this year.

Secondly, a lot of their minimum salary guys are old dudes making over a million. The 10 year vet minimum that they give to Howard, Magloire, Big Z, House and so on comes out to around 1.3 million whereas when the minimum slots are counted against the cap to gauge how much they can spend on outside free agents is only for the undrafted rookie minimum which was only around $437,000.

Yeah just bunch of minimums.