Even though a lockout is upon us, one which might last us through until the very end of existence in late 2012, there's still some bookkeeping to be done. July 1st is (or should be) the date on which one season ends and the next one begins, and thus June 30th is an important cut-off date for certain transactions.

Players with player or early termination options had to decide if they were coming back; the few players with team options awaited an uncertain future; players eligible for QO's had to see if they got them. We also had the added bonus of 2012/13 team options for rookie scale contracts being decided considerably earlier than usual - after all, when the usual end of October deadline comes around, the lockout may still be going on.

All the results are in now, however, and there follows a list of who did what before July 1st.

Apropos of nothing, here are the total contract values of all centres in the NBA, not including those on minimum salaries (or with really close to minimum salaries, such as Samardo Samuels). In cases where a player's position is debatable or flexible, discretion is used, and the player's primary position is used (i.e. Pau Gasol wouldn't be listed at centre, even though he essentially backs up there, because he starts at power forward). In the case of someone like Al Jefferson - who was paid to be a power forward but who will now be a centre - the latter option is used. Figures are as accurate as I can get them to be, which is very.


- Atlanta: Al Horford (rookie scale), Zaza Pachulia (4 years, $19 million)

- Boston: Kendrick Perkins (4 years, $18.2 million), Jermaine O'Neal (2 years, $11,991,200)

- Charlotte: Nazr Mohammed (5 years, $30.247 million), DeSagana Diop (5 years, $32.393 million)

- Chicago: Joakim Noah (rookie scale, for now), Kurt Thomas (1 year, $1,800,000), Omer Asik (2 years, $3,578,500)

- Cleveland: Anderson Varejao (6 years, $48,204,545), Ryan Hollins (3 years, $7 million)

- Dallas: Tyson Chandler (6 years, $63 million), Brendan Haywood (6 years, $52,267,500), Alexis Ajinca (rookie scale)

- Denver: Nene (6 years, $60 million), Chris Andersen (5 years, $21.17 million)

- Detroit: Ben Wallace (2 years, $4,326,400), Jason Maxiell (4 years, $20 million), Chris Wilcox (2 years, $6 million)

- Golden State: Andris Biedrins (6 years, $54 million), Ekpe Udoh (rookie scale), Dan Gadzuric (6 years, $36,003,975)

- Houston: Yao Ming (5 year maximum), Brad Miller (3 years, $14.256 million), Chuck Hayes (4 years, $8,218,500)

- Indiana: Roy Hibbert (rookie scale), Jeff Foster (2 years, $12,734,500)

- L.A. Clippers: Chris Kaman (5 years, $52 million)

- L.A. Lakers: Andrew Bynum (4 years, $57.2 million)

In the recent Creative Financing In The NBA post, I wrote at great length about the Xavier Henry situation. In the span of about 27,000 words, I tried to explain all the nuances of this largely unprecedented and highly unattractive situation, using as many real-life examples and corollaries as I could find.

After that time, far more significant media personalities ran with the story. Starting with NBA.com's David Aldridge - who ran a very similar piece that even used the same Glenn Robinson-based introduction, but who had the ability to get the quotes that a 20-something English student doesn't have - and culminating in an explosive interview with Grizzlies owner Michael Heisley on the Chris Vernon Show, the story became one of the most protracted subplots of the offseason, its explosive crescendo at the Vernon interview making for late-summer viewing joy.

In between those bookends came this piece from the Commercial Appeal's Ron Tillery, that details the required incentives in ways we previously could only guess at.

The Griz have offered Henry 100 percent of that salary with the extra 20 percent tied to performance-based bonuses.

The Grizzlies' proposed incentive package includes:

Participation in summer league.

A two-week workout program with the team's training staff.

Satisfying one of the following: play in NBA rookie/sophomore game during All-Star weekend, or earn an all-rookie selection, or average 15 minutes in at least 70 games.

The agent, Arn Tellem, says the Grizzlies are trying to make Henry meet performance bonuses, such as making the rookie challenge at All-Star weekend or being named to one of the all-rookie teams. He says only one player out of more than 450 since the rookie salary scale was instituted in 1995 has agreed to a performance bonus.

"Basic fairness and equality are fundamental aspects of every positive organization-player relationship, and those concepts are totally absent from the Grizzlies' current proposal to Xavier," Tellem said.

Tellem said Henry would agree to bonuses that are frequently offered to reach the full 120 percent, such as taking part in conditioning programs or playing in the summer league, but said no other team in this draft had asked a player to accept a performance incentive.

Last year, I wrote a couple of posts under the heading of "Creative Financing in the NBA." Inspired by seeing a series of quirky salary techniques that I had not previously seen in my three long and sexless years of compiling NBA salary information, I was inspired to steal Magic GM Otis Smith's favoured phrase without permission, and use it to describe some of the financial anomalies that the offseason transactions had puked over our spreadsheets. The posts were reasonably successful, drawing in both the 25th and 26th regular viewers to the site; more than anything, however, they were a pleasure to write.

Therefore, there follows another post for salary anomalies and trivia from the 2010 NBA offseason, a breakdown of all quirky payroll-related idiosyncrasies and manipulation that took place in front of our very eyes, even if we didn't really notice it at the time. Note: this will not interest you, unless you are really really really boring.

(Mind you, that could be said about this entire site.)

The worst part about maintaining the internet's premier NBA salary information resource is that the information is never static. It is ever-changing. Due to things such as conditional guarantees, trade kickers and the like, rarely do contracts ever stay the same. This is particularly true because of the science of performance incentives.

Performance incentives can be included in contracts for almost any reason, including (but not limited to) All-Star selections, championship, or team wins. The only rules are that any numerical definitions are specific, and that they are for positive achievements only (although God knows why you'd want it otherwise). For example, Kirk Hinrich has performance incentives based on any First Team All-Defensive placements that he gets, and Matt Bonner's just-expired contract was based around his three point and free throw percentages.

These incentives are deemed by the league to be either "likely" or "unlikely". If they are deemed "likely", then they appear on a team's cap number for the upcoming season; if they are deemed "unlikely", then they are not. This is why this information is important to cap space calculations and the like. The likehood of incentives is decided by the league using one simple criterion; whether the player achieved the incentive last year or not. In the case of team-based incentives such as team win totals, this can be changed when a player is traded to a new team; this is perhaps most famously demonstrated by the case of Devean George, whose team win-based incentive went from "likely" to "unlikely" when he was traded from Dallas to Golden State, thereby costing him $200,000. Such is the risk.

Cap hits based on performance incentives are modified during the moratorium, due to a re-evaluation of their incentives. (That's what the moratorium is for - bookkeeping.) Some previously deemed "unlikely" were met, and are now deemed "likely" - some unlucky players have had the opposite happen. There follows a list of all player's salaries that have been modified for the 2010/11 season due to performance incentive changes, and by how much. Details of why these incentives have changed (i.e. what they are based on) are not listed, in part because I don't know them all.

This is an update of the update of the earlier post that detailed the amount of cap room teams will have. It is updated to reflect everything that happened at the draft, including, in the case of the Kirk Hinrich trade, things that haven't happened that soon will.

More importantly, it is updated to reflect the fact that we now know where the salary cap is going to be; with the calculations all down, the NBA has announced that the salary cap for the 2010/11 season will be higher that expected, coming in at $58,044,000.

After all that, it went up from last year.

Other than those things, this is a carbon copy of the initial post. In this edition, there are no entries for teams irrelevant to cap space, because I can't be bothered. If those teams make moves to become relevant, they will get mentioned later.

Thank you for your patience as we resolve the issues that have plagued this website in recent days. We're on top of it now. Sort of.

The free agency season is upon us, and a lot of housekeeping had to be done before we could get going. Players with player or early termination options had to decide if they were coming back; the few players with team options awaited an uncertain future; players eligible for QO's had to see if they got them. All the results are in now, however, and there follows a list of who did what before July 1st.

This is an update of the earlier post that detailed the amount of cap room teams will have. It is updated to reflect the Kings/Sixers traded that was just completed (Andres Nocioni and Spencer Hawes for Sam Dalembert), to reflect some exercised options, and to edit the fact that I typoed a bit in the Timberwolves entry.

It's a carbon copy of the initial post, save for those tweaks.


    Atlanta Hawks


Committed salary for 2010/11: $47,630,214 (view full forecast)

Projected cap space: None


If Atlanta renounce (or lose) Joe Johnson, renounce Josh Childress, renounce their four remaining free agents (Joe Smith, Mario West, Jason Collins and Randolph Morris), and sell or renounce their first round draft pick (#24, cap hold of $963,600), they will have a cap number of $49,524,640 (the committed salary plus four minimum salary roster charges of $473,604 for having less than 12 things on the cap). Barring trades, that's as low as they can get. And yet it's not enough for cap room; if you add on the value of the Bi-Annual Exception ($2.08 million) and the Mid-Level Exception (not yet known exactly, but will be about $5.7 million), the Hawks are over the cap.

Lots of people and lots of places are claiming knowledge of the cap space of various NBA team in anticipation of this summer's free agency bonanza. Most, if not all, have done so misleadingly inaccurately.

Without wanting to sound too douchebaggy (sorry), let's try to get this right. 100% accuracy is not guaranteed, but 99.7% accuracy is. All salary information is taken from this website's own salary pages.

NOTE: All cap space amounts are calculated to an estimated salary cap of $56.1 million. This inexact figure is the most recent (and thus accurate) projection released yet, and will have to suffice for now. When the actual amount is calculated/announced, the sums below will be altered accordingly.


    Atlanta Hawks


Committed salary for 2010/11: $47,630,214 (view full forecast)

Projected cap space: None


If Atlanta renounce (or lose) Joe Johnson, renounce Josh Childress, renounce their four remaining free agents (Joe Smith, Mario West, Jason Collins and Randolph Morris), and sell or renounce their first round draft pick (#24, cap hold of $963,600), they will have a cap number of $49,524,640 (the committed salary plus four minimum salary roster charges of $473,604 for having less than 12 things on the cap). Barring trades, that's as low as they can get. And yet it's not enough for cap room; if you add on the value of the Bi-Annual Exception ($2.08 million) and the Mid-Level Exception (not yet known exactly, but will be about $5.7 million), the Hawks are over the cap.

Trade kickers are a salary mechanism that increase a player's salary when they are traded. They are both important and difficult to accommodate when formulating trade scenarios, and thus it's useful for them to be known. Kickers - technically known as trade bonuses, but colloquially as kickers, which we'll stick with here - can only be bothersome to teams and emphatically benefit a player. As such, they're far from commonplace. But there's enough of them out there, and it helps to know about them.

Contrary to some belief, trade kickers can not be waived. Not recreationally, at least. A player cannot waive a trade kicker just to make their crappy contract look more desirable. Only in one specific circumstance can a trade kicker (or part of one) be waived; when a player has to waive some money to make a particular trade connotation meet the rules of trade finances. This very very rarely happens, partly because it obviously requires the player's permission, although it did happen just this year after Devin Brown vetoed a trade to Minnesota when he refused to waive his. Doesn't happen much, though.

There follows a list of all current NBA contracts that feature trade kickers, along with the value of them. Note that trade kickers have no expiry date other than the expiration of the contract itself, and that having a percentage listed means that's the percentage of their remaining salary that they will additionally get with the bonus.

A while ago, I wrote about Anthony Morrow's impending free agency, breaking down how much he could sign for and why. If you have not read it, please do so, and I won't stab this puppy.

Morrow's situation is not unique, for his is a situation that arises every offseason. Lots of players's first contracts are two year minimum salary deals, and those who manage to make it to the end of them are usually worthy of new contracts at that time. Others in Morrow's situation this season include Jawad Williams, Will Bynum, Bobby Brown and Nathan Jawai; I mentioned Morrow specifically only because he is the one deemed most likely to get the largest contract offer this summer, and therefore his is the one that gets asked about most.

A similar situation to those of Morrow et al is to be found in the situations of those who signed one year minimum salary deals, and who will be restricted free agents to a team with only non-Bird rights on them. It's a situation that will apply this offseason to Mario West, Anthony Tolliver, Chris Hunter, Mustafa Shakur, Patrick Mills, Jon Brockman, Cedric Jackson and Cartier Martin; however, the most intriguing player to whom it applies is free agent Jazz swingman, Wes Matthews, for the simple reason that he's the most likely of the bunch to command more than the minimum salary.

Of all the possible free agents this upcoming offseason, Golden State's Anthony Morrow is one of the restricted free agents that is garnering the most attention amongst fans. Well, amongst Bulls fans he is, at least.1

Morrow only really does one thing; he shoots jumpshots. He is not much of a ball handler, nor much of a defender, nor much of an athlete, nor much of a slasher, nor much of a finisher around the basket. But he does own a jumpshot. A really, really good jumpshot. A really, really, really, really good jumpshot. A jumpshot so good that it spawned its own cult. And in this current NBA era, you can never have too many shooters.

If you need a shooter, you could always sign Casey Jacobsen. He'll need work this summer. You could also sign Desmon Farmer, Billy Thomas, Marcus Vinicius, Nikoloz Tskitishvili, or some old fringe NBA veteran who would happily sign for the minimum and relish the chance to sit on an inactive list. Worst case scenario, you could sign Ryan Ayers. But a lot of people want Morrow, for the simple fact that he has 47% and 46% from three point range in his two NBA seasons. Can't say I blame them. I want that too.

However, if you wish to sign Anthony Morrow, there's some things you should know.

In the last week, more than 10% of the NBA was rehomed. 17 teams conspired to make 13 trades, and 43 players in the league were traded (along with 1 that isn't). A possible 14 draft picks changed hands, along with enough cash to support Iceland for a week. Three players were waived to accommodate incoming players (Chris Richard, Ricky Davis, Kenny Thomas), and one just wasn't asked back (Garrett Temple; re-signed since this intro was written). Trades ranged from the hugely significant (Kevin Martin) to the overbearingly underwhelming (Theo Ratliff). To use a phrase I use way too much, there truly was something for everyone. Unless you're a Heat fan.

(Drew Gooden and Larry Hughes also managed to achieve the dubious honour of being traded at three consecutive trade deadlines, with Gooden compounding his misery by compiling four trades in that time. It also seems reasonably inevitable that Gooden will be bought out by his new team (the L.A. Clippers), making him possibly the first player ever to be salary dumped at the deadline, only to be bought out and sign with a contender, in consecutive seasons. Congratulations, I think.)

I have only 48 things to say about this deal.

1) As his profile suggests, I have long regarded Peter Fehse as a yardstick for a person's NBA knowledge. If a fan knows who Peter Fehse is, they are freaking hardcore and deserve your respect.

Short story short, Peter Fehse is a lanky German with lots of hair, who was drafted in the second round in 2002 as an absolute longshot based on his combination of height and athleticism. He never amounted to anything NBA calibre, partly because he never had NBA calibre to begin with, but also because of constant injuries.

It has been over seven years since Peter Fehse was last heard of in NBA circles; indeed, he's barely even heard in German basketball cirles either. Fehse has not played this season, played in only two games last season, and did not play in 2007/08, all of which is due to injury. As long shot projects go, he was about as long shotty as a 49th pick can be, and is even more of a throw-in than Andy Betts was when he was traded for Peja Stojakovic in July 2006. Gotta love that.

The NBA's luxury tax first came into existence in 2001, the year in which the league's funky new escrow system debuted. The escrow system, in layman's terms, is a system that withholds a certain amount of player's salaries and puts it into a separate account until the end of the following season's moratorium. At that point, when the league's annual audit is done (that's what the moratorium is for; calculating the numbers and stuff), then if the league-wide player salaries exceed a certain percentage of the league's overall revenue, that account is divvied up amongst the owners and the players never see it. Similarly, if the league wide salaries do not exceed that percentage, the players get it back. Essentially, it's a failsafe measure to prevent players from getting paid too much. Luxury tax is an extension of the escrow system, designed to put more money back into the owner's pockets if they feel the players are getting too much of it.

If that sounds like something that might excite you sexually, a longer description with all the relevant numbers and stuff was written by the seminal Larry Coon, and can be found here:

http://members.cox.net/lmcoon/salarycap.htm#Q15

As you might presently yourself fully be aware of, the luxury tax is an owner-friendly system also designed to prevent rich teams from simply outspending the rest of the competition. It is calculated by using a projection of the following year's Basketball Related Income (roughly 61% of it; a more detailed description of the calculation can be found here), and the idea behind it is simple - you can have a payroll of as much as you like, but if you cross that tax threshold, it starts costing you more. It's designed to be a deterrent, and to emphasise parity amongst the league's payrolls, thus tying in nicely with David Stern's slightly communist idea of all teams having a chance to compete.

Does it work? Let's find out.

Yesterday, the Detroit Pistons waived 2008 second draft pick and flopper extraordinaire, Deron Washington. They had initially signed him back in August to be their 14th and last man, giving him a two year minimum salary deal with $250,000 guaranteed in the first season. Yet after bringing in Chucky Atkins on an unguaranteed one year deal for training camp (a move that they won't have foreseen prior to the Washington signing), the Pistons began to feel that Atkins was more deserving of the 14th man spot, and so they waived Washington to allow them to keep Chucky.

That's the official line, at least. It doesn't really make a lot of sense though.

Disregarding the respective talent levels and fits on the roster of the two players, the finances of the situation seemed to dictate that Deron stayed on. Washington's large amount of guaranteed money (over 50% of his overall contract for this year) meant that the Pistons could have kept him on until the league-wide contract guarantee date of January 10th, without having to pay him a single extra penny outside of meal stipends. Waive him yesterday, and he'll cost $250,000; waive him on January 6th, and he'll still only cost $250,000.

Therefore, why waive him?

Simple question: Did the tough economic climate affect NBA team's spending plans as much as MSM scaremongerers would have you believe?

Not-so-simple answer: Kind of.

This summer saw a team that could have had nearly 8 figures of cap room opt not to use any of it. The Oklahoma City Thunder did pretty much nothing with their offseason once draft day was completed, and having won a total of 23 games last year, it's justifiable to ask why that was. There follows some exploratory maths, which get a bit dull and confusing.