Could we not also get there by waiving or buying out saric? And my understanding is we can offer the full nontax MLE now and wont pay tax as long as we are under by before end of the season (ie could waive saric at deadline) or have i misunderstood it?
Thx for the insight.
Yes, we actually have a route here.
To use round numbers: Right now we are at $186M for 14 players - this includes Terrence Davis who is unguaranteed.
Because of the Schröder sign-and-trade we are absolutely hard-capped at the first apron, which is $196M. So without making any moves at all, we have roughly $10M - Spotrac says a little bit less at $9.88, but I think that may be counting $200K to TD that is apparently (??) not guaranteed. Regardless, roughly $10M under the apron.
There are only a few things that we can do to save significant money on that, outside of making a trade or doing something completely unexpected (like waiving Monk or something).
1) We could waive TD, which would gain us $2.5M in space. This would leave us with roughly $12.5M of the MLE, but we would have to sign a player to get to the 14-player roster minimum. (Hypothetically this is the player we offer the partial MLE to, so not an issue.)
2) We could waive-and-stretch Saric. Waiving Saric would save $3.6M via the stretch provision and leave us with roughly $13.6M of the MLE. The 14-player minimum would again be covered by the player we sign with the MLE.
3) We could combine both of these moves. However, this would not result in the full $6.1M worth of apron space, because we would be at 12 players and would need to add not one but two players while staying under the apron. Since we are discussing using the bulk of the MLE on one player, the other player would preferably be a true rookie, who could be paid a league minimum for players with no experience - a bit under $1.3M. So, we could, for instance, elevate Dylan Cardwell to the big squad and retain $14.8M worth of apron space ($4.8M on top of the $10M we already have). Since the MLE is $14.1M, we are golden there. We're hanging in by the skin of our teeth and in a pretty big pinch if we have a bunch of injuries, but we can get to the full MLE without discarding any players we really care about, or making any trades that save money.
(We should note that the luxury tax level is actually lower than the first apron and that we are about $3.3M *closer* to the luxury tax than to the first apron, but the luxury tax level does not stop us from making any transactions...including using the "Non-Taxpayer MLE". In point of fact, this should probably be called the "First Apron MLE" because it is the first apron, and not the tax level, that is the strict ceiling for this exception. Still, the luxury tax level is another consideration for the front office, even if it is not a strict cap.)