2 mil higher than expected Officially salary cap number is $58,044,000, up from $57.7 million last season. Tax line rises to $70.3 million, up from $69.9 million
Interesting... Gives some teams such as Chicago and Miami a little more room for free agents and other teams like OKC have to worry a bit less about the luxury tax.
Last offseason some projections had the cap as low as $50 million, those doom and gloomers were off by quite a bit. I believe the NBA itself may have even put $50 mil as the low end of their range in an internal memo sent to league owners and executives.
So the cap is conviently 2 mill higher than expected, allowing Miami the room to sign LeBron without trading. Does this smell like David Stern? I have no idea how the cap is ultimately determined, so please enlighten me. But if Stern has the ultimate say this just seems really shady.
Are these numbers made available to the public? Or are we just supposed to trust that slimeball Stern? edit: not the cap itself, but the revenues of the 30 teams
As with all privately owned companies they don't have to release detailed financial information to the public. Bank's and other entities with financial relationships to the teams will have more detailed information but the public doesn't have a need to know. Except for the paranoid conspiracy theorists.
It's going to hurt negotiations. The players will look at the cap figures and the money being spent on free agents and demand a continuation of the status quo, calling the owners a bunch of Chicken Littles. The owners will press hard, hoping for a "stop me before I kill again" kind of CBA that limits their ability to spend.
