Can you do Sign-and-trades any more?

Basically the only way we'll get a rotation player through free agency is if his current (or just ex-) team re-signs him and trades him to us. But I have a nagging feeling that that's not allowed any more. Anyone know the rules, both for UFAs and RFAs?

 

You can but it's almost impossible for us to do so because you have to be under the tax apron and are hard capped.

Basically it is virtually impossible to pull off for a team in the Blazers position and not worth anyone's time thinking about.

 

This was a detailed breakdown from another thread:

Guys c'mon, I am going to have to copy this post and paste it every time someone posts a sign-and-trade.

Sign-and-trades are not allowed if the team is over the tax apron at the conclusion of the trade. If they aren't over the tax apron then they are hard capped at the apron. So even if the Blazers managed to pull it off they'd be totally screwed. Here's why (going to use rounded numbers to make it easier to understand):

Expected luxury tax line: $121 million
Expected tax apron line: $125 million
Current Blazers Guaranteed Salary for 2018-19 (8 players): $110 million
Blazers Salary until they cut Baldwin, PapaG, and Layman: $115 million
Blazers Salary until they renounce free agents Nurk, Davis, PC, and Napier: $144 million

What these numbers mean is that the Blazers would not be able to do a sign-and-trade easily even if they weren't worried about being hard capped. A hard cap at $125 million means that the Blazers couldn't go over that number for ANY reason for the whole league year, so in this case through June 30th 2019. So right away in order to even do the sign-and-trade we'd have to renounce Davis, PC, and Napier to get under the tax line. They'd be gone, with almost no possibility to be kept. Nurkic would probably have to go too which I will explain why in a minute.

Okay so in this scenario I am going to show the most favorable trade possible for the Blazers, without factoring in what the Thunder would want, which in my opinion would be: Paul George $30 million max for Turner, Leonard, Swanigan, #24, and a 2020 1st round pick which is almost exactly the same as George's contract.

So after this trade we'd be at $113.5 million in contracts with 8 players under contract (Dame, CJ, George, Collins, Aminu, Harkless, Baldwin, and PapaG). I'd assume we cut Layman on June 30th before this trade could've happened. We'd still have the rights to Nurk with a cap hold of $8.8 million. Keep in mind we'd be hard capped at this point at $125 million. That means we'd have $11.5 million to sign 5 players (we'd have to reach the minimum) including Nurk. Now there is a little tiny bit of wiggle room by cutting any of the three non-guaranteed contracts of Baldwin or PapaG but the difference between them and a minimum contract somewhere else isn't big enough to really matter in this too much. Since we need 5 players we'd have to factor in 4 minimum contracts when re-signing Nurk (approximately $600,00 each). This means the absolute max we could offer Nurk at this point is about $9 million per year. If he signed any offer sheet with another team for more than that amount we would lose the right to match and he'd be theirs.

So lets say that happened and Nurk was gone too. We'd have PapaG as our only big man with basically only the MLE and undrafted free agents to fill out the roster. I guess we could still technically use the TPE's but we'd still only be able to accept $9 million back and still have to round out the roster with four minimum free agent rookies. We could offer Davis the MLE at $8 million.

Once again this scenario would only work if the Thunder accepted Turner and Leonard back which they wouldn't but I'll still play along and we'd have this roster:
Dame/Baldwin/Undrafted Rookie
CJ/ Undrafted Rookie
George/Harkless
Collins/Aminu/Undrafted Rookie
Davis/PapaG/Undrafted Rookie

The only trades we could make are ones that brought back both less money than we sent out and left room to sign more rookie free agents if we sent out more than we brought back. This would be the absolute best case scenario if every single thing broke perfectly in the Blazers favor. Unfortunately the OKC owner is cheap and won't want to stay in the luxury tax if it isn't for Paul George so he'd be gone.

I really cringe every time someone mentions sign-and-trade this summer. I hope this helps.

 

Well that sucks.
Next question: are lopsided trades still allowed? So could you do a sign-and-trade with Philly or the Suns (assuming they've both got cap room)?

[Edit: I see you've sort of answered that in the the last section. If we want to keep the dream alive, couldn't we envisage a three-team-trade with OKC, Portland and a team with cap room?]

 

Any sign-and-trade coming in or going out would put us in a bad position for a season.

Lets look at Cousins. This is everything it would take to get him:

1) You'd have to get a meeting with him considering there is no cap room most agents wouldn't even take that meeting.

2) You'd have to convince him to sign here even though you'd be losing good pieces (like CJ) to make that happen.

3) You'd have to convince the Pelicans to accept CJ or whatever package offered.

4) You'd then have to find a team with cap space who were willing to take on at least Leonard and possibly Turner for no contract coming back when there aren't many teams with money to do so.

I just don't get how that is worth anyone's time figuring out how to make that all work.

 

The Blazers are not "screwed". We need Collins to develop and we need a decent player in the draft. That will keep us on an upward trajectory.

 

We don't just need a "decent" player in the draft, we need to find a diamond-in-the-rough, stud 2-way player like Jimmy Butler (30th pick) or Draymond Green (35th pick) that will be available when we're picking. Or we need to identify a guy like Kawhii or Giannis (both 15th picks) that we can trade up to get.

Yeah, finding a guy like that is an extreme long shot, but it happens, and it's what this team needs to become a contender.

BNM

 

Agreed.

There was some know it all who kept arguing with me about team flexibility. He kept saying that the higher Portlands payroll, the more flexibility we have.... I just hope he sees the errors of his thought process now.

 

I still disagree. Butler & Green are great players, but we still wouldn't be a contender with either of them. We still need a lot more top tier talent.

 

you put DGreen as our starting PF and put AMinu on the bench and we can compete. Id say we would also compete if we put Butler in at SF and got rid of Turner.

 

If you are talking about me, we can't do anything to change what has already happened so let me know what is wrong about this (Edit: I posted this 4 weeks ago in another thread):

Summer of 2018: Already over the cap with 4 free agents. re-signing Nurk makes luxury tax a foregone conclusion. This is a good thing in our situation. The last two years we've been so concerned about staying out of the luxury tax that it has completely limited our situation. We weren't able to use the MLE last summer or make many moves because they wanted to stay under that line. Staying under that line, short of a miracle trade, isn't an option this year. You mentioned wanting to appease Dame. I believe Allen will do so by going into the tax for him. There are a couple of things that stay the same whether we use the TPE or not and that is that we'd have the tax-MLE to sign a free agent and the 24th pick in the draft. Trades can happen under either scenario. So that leaves using the TPE's as simply adding more money to this year but could be the difference in making this team better or remaining relatively the same.

Summer of 2019: Once again assuming Nurkic is re-signed and no miracle trades to get out of bad contracts are made, we are still over the cap. We have our 2019 1st round pick, a 2nd rounder (via whichever pick is better between Minnesota and LA Lakers), and the tax-MLE. Aminu is the only major free agent. If we don't use the TPE this summer it doesn't give us more options this summer, once again it just puts us further into the tax then we would have (unless we used it on a guy that only has one year left on his deal in which case he'd be off the books then). So where am I missing that next summer would have better options if we didn't use the TPE? We still have our picks and the tax-MLE available in either scenario. The contracts of Turner, Leonard, and Harkless all would have one more year left which may make them more valuable during the season as expiring contracts. If we just put Courtney Lee in as our TPE trade then he would also have one more year left at this point.

Summer of 2020: Lee, Turner, Leonard, and Harkless are now all off the books. If Olshey planned things similar to the summer of 2015 where most/all trades and signings lined up to end this season (for example re-sign Davis in 2018 to a two year deal) we'd still have Dame, CJ, Nurk, Collins, Swanigan, and our 2018 and 2019 draft picks on the team and would be back to having as much flexibility as possible when two players like Dame and CJ make over $60 million. Using the TPE's back in 2018 did nothing to change flexibility at any point in this process.

 

The problem with hoping for a diamond in the rough is, there is a reason they are a diamond in the rough... they have potential but far from a finished product... it will take 3-5 years to develop a championship level contributer from pick 24.... and there are too many moving parts with other teams to bank on that and let the cake bake... trading CJ is the chance for a possible way out of this jam

 

I know it doesn't make sense but there are actually less restrictions to teams in the tax than teams below it that use the full MLE, BAE, or sign-and-trades and become hard capped. The only thing it really effects is how much Allen has to pay. However, my point (and what sounds like partially Denny's point was) is that if we are strictly looking at it from a flexibility point of the roster that it makes sense to not worry about the tax.

 

So, you don't think if we added Butler/Green type 2-way player to our current roster, without giving up any of Dame, C.J., Nurk and Collins, we wouldn't be in a position to contend prior to Dame and C.J. declining significantly?

I think we may need to agree to disagree. Of course the younger guys, including Nurk would need to improve, but we already saw what a difference ONE good defensive player (Nurk) can make. Imagine adding a DPOY/1st Team All Defense player would make, especially if it's one like Butler who can also reliably provide 20+ ppg on a nightly basis.

BNM

 

The draft is a crap shoot no matter where you are picking. That's just the nature of the beast.

Kawhi (15th pick) won finals MVP in his 3rd season at the age of 22.

The problem I see with your trade C.J. scenario is you're not telling us who we will get that won't just replace C.J., but will be so spectacularly better that they will lead us into contention. Even if we luck out and get a player who is better than C.J. in return, we're still lacking a reliable third scorer probably playing (at best) 4-5 on offense.

So, give us one or two example trades that are both feasible and make us better faster than getting lucky and finding the next Butler/Draymond/Kawhi/Giannis in the draft.

Yeah, mine is a long shot, but so is yours.

BNM

 

Technically, just about every team is screwed moneywise with the cap. Even the Fakers, who are counting on getting ALL these free agents to sign with them are dreaming unless multiple of these talents accept cheap money deals so I don't see that happening. So the best case is for the Blazers to re-sign Nurk, develop him, add some shooters ,who can actually drill it , to the lineup in free agency, and continue to grow as a team. This team is YOUNG, and Dame ain't OLD, so hang in there, and let's see if our boys can make a run in the next few years. Paul Allen wants to win so don't concern yourselves with the use of his loot. Go Blazers!!

 

I don't remember who it was, but th at the correct context. It was mind boggling.