I hope you won't mind going over this again and again if the situation arises. It's a difficult concept to understand at least for me. Today I think I understand it but by tomorrow I may be baffled. I take it the TPE came into being in part to get around the rule that if both teams are over the salary cap, they need to be trading players withing 15%. Is that part of it? In some ways that doesn't make sense either. Crud.
Team wants to trade a player(s) for a player(s) and is over the cap. Then:
a) Difference in salaries shouldn't be more than 150%, if the team receiving more salary hasn't payed LT previous year, otherwise it's 125% (non-LT team can get back 50% more in salaries, LT one - no more than 25%, but when both teams trade at least $10 million in salaries, percentages turn in restrictions of maximum $5 and $2.5 million differences in outgoing team salaries respectively). That's the key rule, if salaries don't fit in this rule, teams cannot generate TPEs, and deal cannot go through. Teams
can combine salaries to produce bigger TPEs (additional salaries and players they are owed to are often referred to as "fillers", when the trade is discussed),
but cannot combine TPEs.
b) As long as trade complies with rule a) TPEs equal to that of biggest salary(sum of salaries) are generated for both teams, in Kings-Nets trade it was equal to Thornton's salary, because it exceeded the combined salaries of Terry and Evans.
c)Team, that is trading more salary than acquiring, keep the difference as TPE to use later. Teams have unlimited number of minimum salary exceptions for both signing and trading, so if TPE doesn't exceed that, it's useless and isn't kept, though teams must specifically waive it as it's still produced and is a part of a cap hold.
Assuming that Collison got the same amount as Shaun Livingston, the his salary for next season is $5,305,000.
Add that to the current salaries (including Stauskas) and our salaries add up to $74,871,101.
http://hoopshype.com/salaries/sacramento.htm
hoopshype.com is notoriously inaccurate, they get in the ballpark, but lose couple hundred thousand here and there and over 13 player team salary it adds up. You should always use
http://data.shamsports.com/content/pages/data/salaries/index.jsp. They had a couple of errors over the last 3-4 years (sham posts on realgm and was corrected a few times), but overall he's much more reliable than
hoopshype.com. Current team salary of $76.2 million with Collison's salary of $5.1 million also explains why they draw the line for IT salary, so that they won't step over the LT boundary.
Unfortunately, it also means, that chances of Kings finishing the season with 14 players on guaranteed salaries is very slim. Sure they can carry a couple of non-guaranteed guys until first week of January, but cut them, when their contracts are about to become guaranteed for the rest of the season (a long string of 10 days contracts is an option after that, I guess.).
