WaltFrazier wrote:The term, into the luxury tax has been around a while now. But the newer terms first and second apron, how do they relate? Where will Indy be with $30 M for Turner? And will they have to lose some depth pieces to make room?
think of it like tiers with different outcomes. i don't understand them all, but they are to prevent big teams from being able to say "we can eat the tax, so we'll do whatever."
crossing the luxury tax alone is a financial penalty. first apron comes with some additional roster move restrictions. second apron comes with even more that can also include a hard cap and loss of draft capital if crossed in consecutive seasons.
as for turner, given that they have been careful not to even go into the tax at all, it's possible we're talking just luxury tax here. first apron at worst. i can't imagine they intend to go into the second apron right away. but, they could. they're in the finals. win or lose, they might see the next few years as a window worth the penalties.
i would honestly throw your question into a LLM and see what it says. would probably be a good starting point. google now has gemini built in for free. bing has had copilot/OpenAI in there for a while. we can come into these conversations with a lot more baseline information than ever before, which is fun.
https://www.basketball-reference.com/contracts/IND.htmlhttps://www.spotrac.com/nba/apron/_/year/2025just adding turner's $30m (or more) alone would put them at $198m with 12 roster spots and some cap holds. that's expected to be first apron territory next year. i'd assume mathurin and sheppard's options get picked up. probably walker too. bradley might be a cap casualty, but would also represent a cap hold going down to 11 players under contract. so they'd likely have to be very cautious to not go into the second apron right off the bat. outside of a couple of role player trades or consolidations that dilute depth, i'd think they're largely running it back and continuing to grow -- as they've done nicely since the siakam deal.