I think a fwds rotation of little, Winslow Waterford and one of Anderson or young signed for the mle or the better part of it is intriguing. It looks a whole lot better with the potential grant acquisition Imho. I really like smith but see him as more of a 5 defensively in billups defense.
Are we talking tax payer/mini MLE because I'm pretty sure if Nurk and Ant take up 40M in cap space for next season that the full MLE will take us into the tax and that will hard cap us which would render the TPE that everyone says made the CJ deal more palatable useless.
I've been pointing that out. Unless something drastic happens during the draft, I think there's little chance the Blazers use the full-MLE
He ain’t no spring chicken and can’t shoot for shit, but he does provide length and close out ability on the perimeter.
Assuming 40 between nurk and simons to start off, we'd be at ~118 million for 10 players and dead money. If we simply make our two picks, that adds another 9, so 127 for 12 players. Cap is at 122, luxury tax is 149. The apron would be a little over 155 then. We'd be unable to use both the full mle AND the full TPE, however, it seems unlikely that either every player will be back next year, or that we will use both picks. There's definitely avenues to using both, but I don't really like the idea of being hard capped personally. I can see us being able to dump the small guarantee that Bledsoe has for cash to cover his salary as one example to shed $$.
I'd think the apron might be closer to 150M than 155M but that's a quibble and I might be wrong. The last projection I saw was the cap at 121M I'm hoping no more than 40M for Simons and Nurkic, so depending on what the Blazers do with the back end of the roster, they'd probably be around 125-130M before the 'big ticket' items. That would be the variables of the draft picks, trades, and TPE's. If they traded Bledsoe + Pels pick for Grant they'd already be at 140-145M. If they used the TPE on Grant, they'd have that 3.9M dead salary of Bledsoe. So, hard to see a way to use the full-MLE I'm really hoping Portland carries those TPE into next season's trade deadline. They could be valuable leverage in all kinds of trade discussions
The apron is 6 million Iverson the tax line, plus some small percentage points. I think it was 2 days ago, they released new rstimate of 122 and 149 for cap and tax lines.
