A trade exception allows us to take salary back I believe. So unless the Suns have a trade exception, I don't think it would work.
According to ESPN's trade machine, Phoenix's largest trade exception is for $711,517, while Sergio makes $874,000. So no, it would not. The rule where you have to come within 25% of matching salaries doesn't apply with trade exceptions.
Interesting. If that's the case I don't understand the value of the TE when you're under the cap. Could someone explain?
Someone can trade us a player with a salary less than our trade exception, and we don't have to send anything back to them to make salaries match (as we normally would have to do). So, to choose one random (hilarious) example, Minnesota could trade us Sebastian Telfair for nothing or for a 2nd round pick or something.
My understanding of the CBA states that you either lose or can't use a TE when you are under the cap. However, I believe until July 1, we are not "under the cap". If we don't use our TE tomorrow, we probably won't use it. We could trade Sergio to New York for their TE. Two years ago, the only way we got the 24th pick, that landed us Rudy, was by using our TE to also take on James Jones' contract (in two separate deals)that Phoenix didn't want to pay; something like that could happen, but is unlikely given our goal to increase cap space.
Your TEs count as holds. So technically, you could keep IDTE for a 2.913M hit to your cap space. You can use them. But most teams renounce them, b/c "free space" doesn't have the same restrictions as TEs do.
One option is to spend the next 6 days trading for what we want, getting over the cap (including exceptions, extending a QO to Frye, etc) and having all of our exceptions (BAE, MLE, IDTE, any other ones we trade for) and build sign-and-trade packages around Frye (at any salary both teams and Frye agree to). Or renounce Frye's QO and the trade exceptions to have pure space.
