Can someone explain salary caps to me?

[Swizzington]

Hello, I recently bought this game - loving it, but - I have no idea how salary caps work or how I can sign free agents. I thought perhaps my team (Orlando) just has no money or something. The most I can ever offer a free agent is like 3m a year and they want 20m...also, where it says CAP STATUS: -$9M does that mean I am 9 million over the cap or 9 million under? I am assuming everyone has the same cap? I see some people going like 40m over their cap...

Basically the whole thing around contracts, caps and financial stuff is confusing to me, it's not something I am familiar with, any help would be much appreciated!

[Warriors11]

yes -9M means you are 9m over

NBA has a "soft" cap - lots of details but bottom line you can go over cap to sign your own players. but if you want to sign a big name high salary player you will need to clear cap space (expiring, trades, rising cap)

a "hard" cap which none of the major sports have would be you have say 100M and that it, no exceptions. most modern leagues have lots of details and exceptions. the NBA in particular

a couple screens to pay attention to

[Warriors11]

league finances


this shows all the finances for the league - most teams are over. if you are "really" over (there is a specific setting) then you are in the luxury tax. In real life this luxury tax in progressively punitive. in simple terms being over the tax one year isnt so bad, but consecutive years, especially multiple consecutive years keeps any team from going full NY Yankees. (IRL - this is why the Warriors had to dump so much salary to sign Durant otherwise they would be multiple offenders and his cap hit could be 2-4 his actual salary)

[Warriors11]

your contracts


(p) indicates player option, (t) team option

all contracts are guaranteed (unlike NFL) so releasing a guy and you still owe his full cap. to dump a guys salary you have to trade him to a team that can take his salary (which is usually hard to do for guys who you would consider dumping)

also the order you re-sign guys matters. So sign FA before you extend your own guys (more risky in game then in real life because you cant let them know you are doing that)

[Warriors11]

so in looking at this warriors situation there is 65M in guaranteed money (so 28M available) But Durant has a player option and Curry is expiring (and of course we want them both back)

lets pretend for simplicity we dont care about livingston, iggy, clark... all the expiring players. the real warriors do. but we want to keep this simple

so we are going to keep the signed guys McCaw, Klay, Green, Looney and Jones.

and we are going to "ask" Durant to NOT exercise his option

this ups our 28M available to 55M

now remember we were NOT in the luxury tax last year so we dont have to worry about escalating tax, so we can go a little crazy

remember we have 55 - we were assume the max is 30/year to keep it simple.

and in this thought example lets pretend that LeBrons option was for 2017 (IRL it is in 2018)

we LeBron opts out and we give him a call and 30M - that knocks our 55M down to 25M but we do have Green, Klay and LeBron (and the 3 young cheap guys)

Zach Randolf has an expiring and that would be fun, so we give him a call and 10 - we are now down to 15M with Green, Klay, LeBron and ZBo - but still no curry or Durant yet...

[Warriors11]

wiht our 15 left we decide to get serious and give Steph and Durant both 30/year. Wait how did we do that with only 15 left? well because the NBA CBA encourages stars to stay with thier team and you can go over to resign your own guys. So our 15 avialble is now -45 over the cap with a nice little "core" of Green, Klay, LeBron, Curry and Durrant with ZBo and the 3 youngsters off the bench. pretty good huh?

but that is only 9 guys.

our last draft pick Lebron james 10 year old son gets the slot for last pick in 1st round which is about 1M and we are now 46 over with 10 guys.

but we arent done

now we call Iggy and give him the "mid level exception" (always do this AFTER you sign everyone else you want because it counts against the cap but you CAN go over to sign this guy. It is around 5M. Because we did it now it takes us from 46 over to 51 over, no big deal. If we did it first when we had 28 available it would have knocked us down to 23 which would be a big deal

we sign livingston and west AFTER the FA period and summer is over because they will take the minimum around 1M and we have a final roster and a nice little 48 over payroll....

[Warriors11]

Now to truly understand lets try and do the same thing but we do it in the "wrong" order.

to start Durrant doenst understand the plan and so he doesnt opt out and he wants to resign next year. so our 28M stays at 28M.

also Iggys agent called and he is willing to take the mid level but he wants it RIGHT NOW. so 28 becomes 23.

we call Lebron and he laughs at 23 and takes his talents back to Miami for 30

Zbo is on the line, but Steph is mad we talked to LeBron and he is willing to come back but only if we sign him now. so we give him the 30 but now we are 7 over and we "only" have Green, Klay, Curry, Durrant, Iggy and the 3 youngsters.

now that we are over and we have already given our mid level we cant offer more then the minimum to anyone. so we have the 8 guys and have to fill out the remainder of the roster with all min level guys. we will still get our rookie and lvignston and west can still come post summer. But with the exact same cap situation we miss out on lebron and Zbo. only because we got the order of signing wrong.

again this is a lot easier in real life because you have the discussion with the agents (for example IRL last year when they got Durant they technically didn't have the cap room, the agreed, then made the moves to make it work. that never happens in game because the game cant agree to your plans, only to concrete numbers)

hope this all helps and if you are really, really interested great detail here- http://www.cbafaq.com/salarycap.htm

[Warriors11]

Plus I just looked and it does not look good for Orlando at all

somehow they are on the hook for 74M next year (of course this is just game, some of this has changed IRL) for guys like Fournier, Biyombo, Vucevic, Augustin, Watson and some others

that is tough to win with, tough to offload, tough to attract FA and less flexibility then the warriors have to do fancy moves like the ones I described.

the warriors after years of awfulness got lucky in a couple of big ways

- too many teams passed on Curry and then he signed very team friendly extension because of ankle issues
- too many teams passed on Klay and he settled for less then he was worth to stay in great situation
- everyone passed on Draymond and so they got him for 2nd round money which is crazy - he only last year started to get paid what he is worth
- a little tankapolloza to get Barnes which they eventually turned his and Boguts money into Durant.
- little by little they made this a great place to play (it use to be the best we could attact was Cory Maggette) and so you get guys like Iggy, Livingston, West to all come here for less then they could get on open market (but worse situations) that is another thing the game cant really model yet as IRL the myth is all players go for just the money, but the reality is players have always gone to the right culture and chance to win (Bos, LA) if the money is good enough. that is tough to model in a game - but something I would love to see

[Swizzington]

Thank you for your very detailed response! This was useful and I will refer back to it as I go forward.

I have one more question from something you mentioned. What exactly is a team option? The (p) and the (t), what does that actually entail? I'm pretty clueless...

Oh and on the contract page was does "BIRD" mean?

[Warriors11]

(P) player options and (t) team options are simple - they are contracts which are optional.

A player option (the Durant example) is he has the OPTION to take th 27M for 2017 or he can OPT OUT and become a free agent.

If it is a (t) team option they have the OPTION to pay the player the salary or OPT OUT and cancel the salary feeing the space and making the player a free agent.

There is also option (x) which is both player and team have the option.

BIRD years is named after no less then Larry Bird as he was the first player to sign a contract to stay with his team putting them over the cap. Lot of complicated details - but basic idea is simple. If you have 3 or more BIRD years (that is 3 years with the same team) you can go over the cap to resign those guys. This refers to my comment about the CBA being designed to let star players stay with thier team. BIRD rights are transferable in trades which is why IRL you see "sign and trades" where a FA doesn't want to stay with a team but the new team doesn't have the space under the cap to sign him, so they compensate the original team who gets something (never anything close to the value of the player being signed and traded) and the new team gets the bird rights. I don't believe the sign and trade is in the game, never seen it or know how to execute it.

Lots of detail here - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_salary_cap