Trade & FA 2024-25:

[F Gump]

Hmmm...I like that idea, too. Could you or Mr. Gump remind us why that's not possible? I'm pretty good at following those conversations, but I'm getting worse at maintaining a memorized working knowledge of those issues, unfortunately.

I assume the trade in question is Maxi-Gafford for Collins.

Let me preface these comments with a note about roster size. The NBA max is 15, and minimum is 14. In theory they would not have to refill that last slot in that 2-for-1 trade. BUT they are already working a man short, because they don't use Morris as a player. Would they really consider only having 13? In addition, it appears to me that Nico consistently game-plans for having all the NBA bodies they can have. So I end up thinking that if they do a trade, we have to expect they will game-plan to end up with a full roster, which means there has to be enough room under the hard cap for those salaries.

As a result, in playing with trades, when the Mavs send out more bodies than they get back, we need to add a minimum salary into those empty slots (and all minimums for hard cap math except rookie or 2nd year SRP's are about $2.1M for the full season.)

That is relevant because the Mavs are hard-capped at Apron 1 (can't go over that number by even a penny for even one minute) and currently only about 0.5M under the line.

"Could you or Mr. Gump remind us why that trade is not possible? "--- Short answer is: Because of that hard cap, Mavs generally have to send away as much or more salary than they get back, and just the basic trade is Mavs sending out 24.4 and getting back 26.5. Fail. 

More details: If they plan to fill that newly empty roster slot, the shortfall gets even greater. And if you add another player onto the outgoing pile to try to cover that shortage, then you also need room to fill another empty salary slot.

In theory, you can put enough bodies together to make the math work, but it gets more and more far-fetched with a more complex trade.

On the non-math end of things: here you might have even more issues. Do you make your roster thin as tissue paper, by the sheer lack of numbers? And what is the likelihood of having a player to fill an empty slot who is of any real value, since your shopping list consists of free agents without a job this time of year? And on a player like Collins - what is this going to do to your team harmony, where your backup C/PF is getting 26M but your starters at C and PF who are better and more important both make far less? I think that is a bigger obstacle than anyone realizes (and probably a deal-killer by itself).