https://www.spotrac.com/nba/portland-trail-blazers/cap/ I have us currently at $121,862,228. Luxury tax threshold is about 132. We have a lil more than 10 mil left, depending on what we do with our draft pick.
Crowder at 10 mil on an expiring deal would have been tradeable in 22-23. That pisses me off. He's clearly the superior player and fits our timeline age wise better.
How are you doing your math? I just calculated again and we are at 127. I don't think you're counting the corpse of Varejao and Nicholson.
Got to overpay in those smaller markets. But with his injury history and overall production, that's another dumb MJ move. The Hornets offered him $63 million when he was a RFA years ago. Now he gets double that figure after massive injuries?
He also needs to choose us. It's possible he just chose Phoenix due to a bigger role/less taxes/hate's Portland. We will never know. But I guess if I were in his shoes he stands to have a bigger role in Phoenix, so I would have also chose Phoenix.
Okay so given that we have 5 million left. BAE = 3.6 M Vet min = counts for 1.6 M for lux tax purposes I think the most likely scenario is that we use the BAE and one vet min. That may mean Elleby won't get the standard 3 year deal. Which means we would have 13 players on the roster, and would need to fill out the rest with two-way players. Or, they could sign a few more vet mins, give Elleby the standard deal, and hope to dump some salary during the season. Or, they could skip the BAE altogether, and just sign 3 vet min guys. Either way, if we are over the tax this season, it's not going to be by a lot, but you definitely don't want to do it for purposes of the repeater tax. I think this also means any S&T scenario for Whiteside is out of the equation. We would need to take a chunk of salary back, which will balloon our lux tax payment and make it extremely hard to get out of it during the season without making the team significantly worse.
