Post#552 » by nate33 » Sun Dec 9, 2018 3:04 pm
Edit: Updated to account for Teletovic likely being removed from the salary cap calculation:
I was curious to see what Milwaukee's cap flexibility would be this summer, so I went ahead and did an analysis for you guys.
Under contract next year, you will have the following players at a cost of $66.5M:
- Giannis
- Snell
- Ilyasova
- Maker
- Wilson
- DiVincenzo
The following players have non-guaranteed contracts but they're reasonably useful players who are barely more expensive than vet-minimum cap holds so I assume you'll keep them as well. They'll cost another $5M:
- Connaughton
- Wood
- Brown
You have the following dead cap salaries - ghosts who still count against your cap. The total dead cap is $4.8M:
- Hawes
- Sanders
- Hill
So that's a total cap figure of $76.3M. The salary cap is estimated at $109M so that leaves you with $32.7M in cap room. Actually it's more like $30.7M in cap room because you need to factor two additional minimum-salary slots.
The following players are free agents. Next to them, I have posted their cap holds. That is what they count against the cap unless you renounce them. (Renouncing them would relinquish Bird Rights to exceed the cap to resign them). Once they actually re-sign, their new salary becomes their cap figure. If you refrain from renouncing any of them, your cap number is 124.3M:
- Brogdon - $1.9M
- Lopez - $4.1M
- Middleton - $19.5M
- Bledsoe - $22.5M
The TLDR version is that you will have to renounce all of Brogdon, Lopez, Middleton and Bledsoe to use your $30.7M in cap room, and that isn't enough for a full max contract. You're not landing Durant, Kawhi, Kemba or Klay with that. I think your best bet is to just retain as many of your key free agents as you can before bumping into the luxtax. The luxtax threshold is estimated to be $132M so that leaves you with $55.7M to pay those 4 guys. You'll probably get to keep 3.