Im a bit new to this salary cap stuff and i really dont like complicated things but i been looking at the kings salary at hoopshype.
http://hoopshype.com/salaries/sacramento.htm
So if we traded martin / noc? the other team would have to give us in return? around 20 million worth of salary to make it work?
Could someone sum up trading basics... i looked at wikipedia and it seemed a bit boring.
the basics:
there are two main cutoffs you have to worry about
1) the salary cap
2) the luxury tax
The
salary cap is similar to the cap in other major sports. It is determined as a percentage of league's revenues every year and for a long time, until the recent downturn, it would be inch up every year. One important note is that it is a "soft cap" -- menaing that there are various exceptions built into the rules that allow teams to go above it. In fact in most years the great majority of teams are over the cap. The most important exceptions are the free agent Mid Level Exception, which allows even teams over the cap to sign a mid level or cheaper free agent if they want to, and the so called Larry Bird Exception (since it was put in decades ago because of Larry Bird and the Celtics). The Bird rule is that you can always resign your own players, even if you are over the cap. So you don't have to lose your best players just because of finances.
The
luxury tax was put in a few years ago because of the soft cap to try to keep the richer teams from spending THAT much more than the poorer ones, and to try to control overall spending. It normally hovers about $10mil above the salary cap. So lots of teams spend more than the cap, but if they start to spend TOO much above the cap, they hit the luxury tax and are essenitally punished. Basicaly if you go over the luxury tax threshhold two things happne -- first of all you have to pay a $1 tax for every $1 you go over the luxury tax limit. So basically everything costs double from that point on out. But perhaps even more importantly, all the teams that stay under the tax threshhold every year get all the taxed money from the teams that go over divied up amongst them. In other words if the Knicks spend $10million more than the luxury tax, they have to pay $10 million in taxes to the league, and then the league takes that $10mil and spreads it out to all the teams that stayed under the tax. So going even $1 over the tax limit can actually cost a team a lot of money because it no longer gets that big chunk of money distributed from the teams over the tax limit.
Trading
Okay, so then there are a lot of complicated little trading rules, but the main biggee is just this:
If you are a team over the
salary cap (not the luxury tax, just the cap) and you make a trade, the values of the contracts being traded for each other have to be wihtin 25% of each other. So if you trade $10mil of contracts, then you can only take $12.5mil back. If you are under the salary cap, this rule does not apply to you. You can take back lots more than you are sending out.
The
luxury tax does not directly factor into trades except that very few teams are willing to pay it, and teams are almost comically afraid of going over it. So you will see teams make some bad trades talentwise jsut trying to avoud getting penalized. So if you are fiddling with a trade, and part of the plan is to have one team or the other go over the tax limit...not likely unless it is one of the league's really rich teams.
