Post#126 » by hugepatsfan » Tue Jun 30, 2020 4:14 am
One problem with trading Hayward is his trade kicker... He gets a 15% trade bonus if dealt. We have to pay that and it hits our cap. His trade bonus would be $5,128,062.
Also, even though we're paying the bonus, the other team acquiring him needs to account for him as incoming money for the amount of his salary + the trade exception. His salary is $34,187,085 so add in the trade kicker and the team we're trading to has to account for him as $39,315,148 of incoming money.
Based on trade matching rules, that means any team trading for him would have to send back $31,372,118 of money. So if we have to take back that much money and pay the trade kicker then we'd actually be spending a higher luxury tax bill in trading Hayward.
So let's imagine how an Aaron Gordon trade would work. ORL can't just send him back. They'd have two realistic choices to make the numbers work - either send back Terrence Ross or Al-Faroq Aminu/Khem Birch along with Gordon. Either way, if we want to get below the tax, we need to involve a third team to dump those ancillary pieces to. It's either a 3 year deal for Ross at ~$13M per or $13M of salary in '20-21 + $10M in '21-22. To get a team to just take on that money would probably cost our own 1st rounder, projected #26. And that might be lowballing it, but it's comparable to last year's Tony Snell salary dump between MIL/DET so I'll run with it.
So now we've got the deal to where we're just taking back Gordon's $18.1M salary. But remember, we also need to add in the Hayward trade kicker from earlier. So all together, between A. Gordon's salary and the trade bonus we'd have $23,264,46.75 on the books.
The hardship doesn't stop there. If we want to get enough wiggle room to use the full MLE and stay below the tax we're going to have to salary dump/release Enes Kanter and Vincent Poirier. And to salary dump with nothing coming back might even take future draft picks. And then that still won't be enough. After that my calculations have us stll needing to clear out a little bit more money through some combination of Grant Williams/Langford/Robert Williams or Daniel Theis. Then we can use the full MLE. I don't think it'd be worth clearing all that out to get the full MLE. We could always decide it's fine to be in the tax and just use the partial which might be enough for Aron Baynes.
Looking back on all this, would it be worth it? Is downgrading from Gordon Hayward to Aaron Gordon while upgrading from Enes Kanter to an Aron Baynes type worth the draft picks/young players we had to give up and still being in the luxury tax and setting ourselves up for repeater penalties down the road. I'd argue hell to the no it isn't. I'd say we're making ourselves worse, which would be fine if we were getting financial flexibility but we're not.
I love the idea of trading Hayward to set ourselves up long term, but I'm just struggling to see any sort of scenario where it makes sense once you try to put an actual deal together.