Mid level exception

[Jon]

Anybody know the kings mle situation for 2014-15?

 

[Capt. Factorial]

Anybody know the kings mle situation for 2014-15?

We have one.

The long answer is that we can use our MLE, but we lose it if we fall too far under the salary cap. If Rudy opts in, or if we re-sign him, then there's not much we can do to lose the MLE - we'll be over the cap by a good amount. But if Rudy opts out and quickly signs with another team, we will lose his cap hold and we might fall far enough under the cap that the MLE will go away (it's a close thing with IT's and Gray's cap holds).

However, that doesn't mean that if Rudy opts out, we should quickly spend our MLE lest we lose it. For sake of argument let's throw out some fake numbers to demonstrate. The cap is probably going to be at $63.2M this year, but I'm just going to call it $60M to make numbers easier here. The MLE will be about $6M, the room exception maybe $3M (the room exception is an exception granted to teams who fall below the cap and then spend up to it). So let's imagine we have a salary of $50M and one free agent with a cap hold of $20M. Our cap number is $76M (50 salary + 20 FA cap hold + 6 MLE...ignoring other things like the Bi-Annual and any trade exceptions...rookie draft pick cap holds...I'm simplifying this), we're over the cap and we could spend the MLE.

If we do spend the MLE, our cap number stays at $76M (56 salary + 20 cap hold) and when our FA goes elsewhere, our number falls to $56M - only the salary. We can then spend up to the cap (another $4M) but by using the MLE we lost the room exception, so we're stuck at $60M.

If we don't spend the MLE and our FA goes elsewhere, our cap number drops to $56M (50 salary + 6 MLE). The thing is, this is below the cap of $60M, and the instant that happens - boom! - the MLE disappears and doesn't come back. So our cap number is $50M, all salary. We can then use that to sign one $10M contract up to the cap (this is bigger than the MLE we used above) and on top of that once we reach the cap we get the $3M room exception to spend on another player (not to tack onto the $10M contract, mind you) and we can spend a total of $63M.

So we can actually spend more, and instead of two contracts at $6M and $4M we can have a bigger one at $10M and then another at $3M if we don't burn the MLE "early". The point is that there's not really an incentive to "spending an MLE lest you lose it". I hope that makes sense.

 

[Gary]

Thanks Capt. I didn't know what would happen if Rudy opts out.