RealGM

Not sure why you'd want to do this, but I could think of a conceivable situation or two.

Let's say for the purposes of making salaries match in a trade, you want to increase a player's pay. However, the team they're going to likes their cap situation so they don't want to add more years onto the deal. Can you increase a player's pay for those seasons without actually adding more years onto the deal? Or is payment for those years already locked in from the previous deal?

You are basically asking if you can give a player a raise to match salaries for a trade. No- you can't do that.

What if they agreed to a 100% buyout conditioned on the resigning of a contract for the same number of years at a higher rate? Is there a moratorium for signing with the same squad after a buyout?

Alternatively, what if you bought him out down to 80% of the incoming player's value (125% to make salaries match), then dealt that contract to the other team for players conditioned on the fact that he resigns for enough to recoup the value, plus a little extra? This could work for teams above the cap, even. Consider what happens if you buy a guy out for $3mil/y less than the value of his contract, deal the other team his bought-out deal, and then they pick him up for the MLE.

Malinhion wrote:What if they agreed to a 100% buyout conditioned on the resigning of a contract for the same number of years at a higher rate? Is there a moratorium for signing with the same squad after a buyout?

Whether their is a moratorium on resigning or not (and I don't think their is, as I think Darius Miles was waived and resigned right away, but I'm not 100% certain), you have two other problems with this.

First, the more minor one: they could only do this if they somehow had cap room or an exception to fit the salary in, as waiving the player costs you his bird rights. And if they had cap room, this probably isn't an issue in the first place (I'll come back to that).

Second is what just kills the idea: after signing a player to a new deal, you can't trade them until the later of December 15th or three months after their signing date.

Alternatively, what if you bought him out down to 80% of the incoming player's value (125% to make salaries match), then dealt that contract to the other team for players conditioned on the fact that he resigns for enough to recoup the value, plus a little extra? This could work for teams above the cap, even. Consider what happens if you buy a guy out for $3mil/y less than the value of his contract, deal the other team his bought-out deal, and then they pick him up for the MLE.

You can't trade bought out player's contracts. The end.


To go back to the initial question, I think there is a very limited set of circumstances where it could be needed and could work.

To increase a player's salary without extending the deal, a team needs to be under the salary cap, and player needs to be on a deal longer than 4 years. In that case, after the third year the team and player can renegotiate the deal upward by the amount available under the cap.

So I suppose if the team had some cap room, but not enough to absorb the contract coming in without using the 125%, they might be able to renegotiate a player's deal up to the cap in a way that the outgoing salaries would be large enough to allow them to complete the deal under the 125% + $100 000 amount.

But even if I'm right about this, that is probably never, ever going to come up.

Malathion,
A buyout (as opposed to a straight waiver) is an amendment to a contract which has to be approved by the league. During the approval process, they ask the team "Are their any side deals?" The only acceptable answer to that question is "No".

So all your buyout proposals with conditions involving re-signings would be considered side deals. And while the league might permit the buyout, they would consider the re-signing a side deal, deem it circumvention of the cap, and disallow it.