Trade & FA 2024-25:

[SleepingHero]

I have my computer now, for better math-ing.

KS's number is wrong, for our purposes. Not sure what he included, but someone else (Marks, maybe?) said 14.9, and that number is right - but it doesn't include any cushion for having to stay under the Apron. (There's no chance whatsoever that a team would not leave a cushion - the Apron is unforgiving, there are no exceptions given.)

So I set aside exactly 1M for a cushion, and work from there.

That leaves 13.9 for DJJ, which leaves 1M left over to combine with an outgoing player (in the right trade setup). BOTTOM LINE - If you send out Green, you could acquire a player making up to 13.65M-ish.

Or if we add in Maxi, we can get a guy making 23.65M. But a 2 for 1 we have to account for an empty roster charge, so let's say 21.4

A 4 year deal starting at 21.4 with 5% raises is 92mil. It sounds a lot (*cough for Klay*) but the breakdown is:
21.4
22.5
23.6
24.7

The cap is just going up so that number is gonna hurt less and less. Secondly, looking at this roster construction contract wise, we don't have a guy making anything in their 20s. We basically have Luka+Kyrie and a bunch of MLE deals. Now that's great in terms of keeping costs low, but if we're trying to upgrade the roster in a couple of years after the Kyrie window is closed, it'll be good for us to have a 20 something mil deal that's close to expiring that we can add with an MLE level deal that can get us a difference maker.