Not only do I doubt it, I think you need to reread it.
Here was the situation: you could protect up to 8. But REGARDLESS of how many you wanted to protect, SOMEBODY off your roster had to be left available. That's what the "provided that each current team must leave at least one player unprotected" meant.
So, if you had only 3 guys under contract, you could onyl protect 2 of them, because regardless of anything else, at least one player from each team HAD to be exposed. On the other hand, if you had 12 guys under contract, you could only protect 8 of the 12, and then 4 guys would be exposed.
Our problem was with the first clause, the MUST leave one guy exposed bit. Our 8 under contract were Chris, Brad, Peja, Doug, Mike, Bobby, Darius and Gerald. But, under the rules of the drat, we still had to leave at least one guy available. We could not protect all 8 if that meant we had noboyd to expose. So we had to expose Gerald even though that meant we only had 7 protected. If we had had Peeler signed to a guaranteed secodn year, we could have exposed him, still protected our 8 (including Gerald) and...well, history might have been a little different.
