Renounce their rights means?

skyechappell · Post #1 » by **skyechappell** » Fri Jul 11, 2008 10:10 am

what does that mean than they are unrestricted free agents?
sorry i dont no much about contracts and such...

Los Angeles Clippers renounce their rights to free agents Dan Dickau, Shaun Livingston, Boniface Ndong, Smush Parker and James Singleton.

Mascot · Post #3 » by **Mascot** » Fri Jul 11, 2008 10:10 pm

it allows their qualifying offer to come off the books so that its not included in total salary for the upcoming year as well

tylrrr · Post #4 » by **tylrrr** » Fri Jul 11, 2008 10:14 pm

I think it also hinders a team's ability to do sign and trades in some way.

Time for Change · Post #5 » by **Time for Change** » Sat Jul 12, 2008 1:28 am

Teams have certain rights to exceed the salary cap when re-signing their own players, and also give larger raises than other teams. Also they have rights to match offers to their own restricted free agents. However these rights come at the expense of a cap-hold for those players. The cap-hold is the amount those players count for against the salary cap until they are signed. By renouncing rights to a player, the cap-hold is removed, thus freeing up cap space to sign other players. A restricted FA becomes unrestricted in this case.

For example, in two years when Jermaine O'Neal's contract expires, the Raptors won't immediately have cap room, unless they renounce his rights, because he'll have about a $25 million cap-hold. Note that just because a team renounces their rights to a player doesn't mean they can't still sign him. They just have follow the standard cap rules for signing players.

douggood · Post #6 » by **douggood** » Sat Jul 12, 2008 2:09 am

When you renounce a player you lose all the benefits of him being your free agent. He becomes a unrestricted free agent like everyone else. No bird rights, have to use cap room to sign, cannot be signed and traded etc etc.

Mer-man · Post #7 » by **Mer-man** » Sat Jul 12, 2008 4:43 am

Yeah, I think the biggest thing to understand here is that if you have free agents on your own team, they actually count against your salary cap.

Let's say the salary cap was $50 million. And the Raptors had $35 million dollars committed in salary already, and one more player who was on the team last year left to sign. Most people would think that means the Raptors have $15 million in cap room. But that's not the case. If that player had a $10 million dollar salary, the Raptors are considered to have $45 million on their payroll (to get technical, it would depend on what type of contract they had, but we'll keep it simple), so they'd only have $5 million to sign a player from a different team. This is the case until the Raps either choose to (A) resign that player and apply his new contract value to the cap or (B) renounce that player, meaning they don't want the advantages of re-signing their own player (as explained above).

The reason this is done is to prevent teams from signing other teams' players with their available cap space, and THEN turning to their own free agents, which is when they're allowed to go over the cap.