The league has announced a new salary cap of $58.679MM, according to several NBA reporters, including the Boston Globe's Gary Washburn. The luxury tax will be $71.748MM.
Both figures are up from last season, when the salary cap was $58.044MM and the luxury tax was $70.307MM. Larry Coon of ESPN.com's twitter timeline is full of new information with regards to how the tax and cap affect exceptions and maximum and minimum salaries.
More information has been provided by ESPN.com.
With another free agency period underway, the phrase "poison pill" has popped up again in NBA discussions, but in many cases, the term is being misused or misunderstood. Here's a quick recap on what the "poison pill provision" actually refers to, how it's misinterpreted, and where it's applicable:
As outlined in Hoops Rumors' glossary, the poison pill provision is actually a concept that arises when a team decides to trade a player after signing him to a rookie-scale extension, but before that extension officially takes effect. For instance, if the Raptors had decided to trade DeMar DeRozan in a deal for Eric Bledsoe on draft night, the poison pill provision would have been in play, since DeRozan's new extension (signed last October) wasn't set to begin until July 1st.
Typically, however, the phrase "poison pill" is used to refer to a component of the Gilbert Arenas provision, which is also explained in our glossary. The Arenas provision arises when a player who has been in the league for one or two years hits restricted free agency. Because the player's current team only holds his Non-Bird or Early Bird rights, the club would typically be unable to match a big offer sheet. However, the Arenas rule limits the amount a rival suitor can offer in the first two seasons of a deal, allowing the player's current team to match an offer using the full mid-level exception or the Early Bird exception.
The catch? While a rival team's offer can't exceed the MLE amount for the first two years, a huge salary bump is permitted for the third year, as long as that rival team can fit the average annual salary of the whole offer into its cap space. This is what we saw last summer from the Rockets, when Houston took advantage of the Arenas provision to sign Jeremy Lin and Omer Asik to three-year offer sheets that the Knicks and Bulls decided not to match. Both offers included a maximum raise in year three, which was referred to as the "poison pill."
This year, however, the Arenas rule and that so-called "poison poll" are unlikely to be a factor in free agency. As our free agent tracker shows, of the 12 restricted free agents on the market this summer, only three have just one or two years of experience: Robert Sacre, Pablo Prigioni, and Chris Copeland. Of those three, Sacre and Prigioni are unlikely to get the kind of huge offers that would trigger the Arenas provision.
Could Copeland get one of those offers? It's possible, but so far, his price tag has been rumored to be in the four-year, $16MM range. Since the Knicks don't hold Copeland's Early Bird rights and don't have the full MLE available, the team won't be able to match an offer that starts at more than $3.18MM (the taxpayer MLE), making the need for a so-called third-year "poison pill" unnecessary.
Meanwhile, circling back to Lin and Asik, that third-year "poison pill" in their deals has been discussed again recently, as they've surfaced as potential trade candidates. However, once the Knicks and Bulls decided not to match their respective offer sheets, those third-year raises became less of a factor. While the duo will still be paid significantly more in 2014/15 (about $14.9MM, compared to $5.2MM in '13/14), the cap hit for each player will be the same for both seasons — about $8.37MM. So for a team acquiring either player via trade, a big third-year cap hit wouldn't be a concern.
Essentially, if you read about a poison pill offer or contract this summer, take it with a grain of salt. Neither the actual poison pill provision nor the Gilbert Arenas provision should be a real factor this July.
There were 13 players from overseas selected in this year's draft, the most in six years. Time will tell if this marks the start of a trend, but the influx of international talent has largely been in decline for the last several years, at least when it comes to players drafted directly from overseas.
A record 12 players born outside the U.S. were drafted in the first round on Thursday, as USA Today's Jeff Zillgitt notes, but five of them went to college in the states before coming to the NBA. Anthony Bennett became the first Canadian to go No. 1 overall in the draft, and Andrew Wiggins seems the odds-on favorite to become the second next year, but Bennett was the seventh straight college player to be taken first overall. Andrea Bargnani was the last No. 1 pick to come directly from overseas, in 2006. Giannis Antetokounmpo was the first direct-from-overseas prospect to come off the board this year, at No. 15. The Nuggets took France's Evan Fournier with the 20th pick in 2012; the last time before then that 19 picks went by without a team taking someone directly from overseas was 1994, when Andrei Fetisov went at No. 36 to the Celtics.
Twenty-one years ago this month, all 54 players selected in the 1992 draft had attended a U.S. college, high school or both. Sasha Danilovic, the 43rd pick, was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but he went to high school in Cookeville, Tennessee. Every draft since has featured at least one player directly from overseas, as the table below chronicles. From 1993 to 2001, there was a gradual upturn in both the number of international players taken and the positions at which they were drafted. Then the Rockets took China's Yao Ming first overall in 2002, and a record 20 foreign players were drafted in 2003. The international boom continued through 2006, when the Raptors made the Bargnani pick. The flow of players from overseas has ebbed ever since. Last year's average draft position for internationals, 46.9, is the lowest on the chart.
A couple notes on the list: It doesn’t include Americans, like Brandon Jennings, who played overseas before they were drafted, and D-League entrants, like Chukwudiebere Maduabum, who comes from Nigeria but played in the D-League before he was drafted 56th overall in 2011.
As we've outlined before, there are a number of different ways to follow Hoops Rumors via Facebook, Twitter, and RSS. If you don't want to follow all the site's updates, you can follow team-specific or transaction-only Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feeds. Although we don't have Facebook pages or Twitter feeds for specific players, you can also easily follow all our updates on your favorite player.
If, for instance, you want to keep track of all the latest news and rumors on Josh Smith during his free agency, you can visit this page. If you're interested in keeping tabs on what the Clippers will decide to do with trade candidate Eric Bledsoe this offseason, you can find his page right here.
Every player we've written about has his own rumors page. You can find your player of choice by using our search box (located in the right sidebar); by clicking his tag at the bottom of a post where he's discussed; or, by simply typing his name in your address bar after hoopsrumors.com, substituting dashes for spaces. For example, Smith's page is located at hoopsrumors.com/josh-smith.
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With draft season upon us and free agency around the corner, Hoops Rumors figures to be very busy over the next few months. There are a number of different ways you can follow us to keep tabs on the latest NBA news and rumors this summer and throughout the year.
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If you missed it when we unveiled it earlier this year, be sure to check out Hoops Rumors' new Agency Database. Over the last several months, we have attempted to identify and confirm the representation for each current NBA player, as well as many players who have appeared in the league recently and others who will enter this year's draft.
Our Agency Database can be found anytime on the right sidebar under the "Hoops Rumors Features" menu. It can also be sorted and filtered by player, team, and agency to easily find a variety of information. For instance, if you're interested in finding the representation for the players currently on the Spurs' roster, you can filter by team to create this list.
As players change agencies, such as Kevin Durant recently opting to leave Rob Pelinka at Landmark Sports Agency for Jay-Z's Roc Nation Sports, we note those moves in the database. We are continuing to work toward making the database 100% complete and accurate, so if you have any corrections or omissions, please email us at hoopsdatabase@gmail.com.
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When an NBA team underachieves, its head coach typically becomes the scapegoat for the club's shortcomings. The roster may also undergo some changes, but typically veteran players are more expensive and more difficult to replace than a team's coach. As such, head coaches often bounce from job to job, from team to team, never lasting too long with a single franchise.
That has been more true than ever this summer, with six teams already hiring new head coaches, while four more clubs continue to search for replacements. And even with a third of the Association's teams already taking a ride on the coaching carousel, there may be more movement to come — the Grizzlies look like a good bet to replace Lionel Hollins, while one or two other coaches, such as the Raptors' Dwane Casey, don't appear to have totally solid footing.
The constant turnover in the coaching ranks makes it all the more impressive when a head coach stays in one spot for years, or even decades, in the case of Gregg Popovich in San Antonio. Popovich is by far the longest-tenured head coach in the NBA, but he's not the only one who has been with his team for a while now.
Here's the list of the current longest-tenured coaches in the NBA, along with the month and year in which they assumed the role:
Last night, ESPN.com's Marc Stein reported (via Twitter) that the early estimates given to NBA owners and general managers have the 2013/14 salary cap rising to a projected $58.5MM from this year's $58.04MM. That figure isn't set in stone yet, and won't be until the first week of July, but if it's accurate, it's a tighter cap than we had expected — previous reports had estimated a figure in the neighborhood of $60MM.
Following up on that report, Stein adds today (via Twitter) that teams are being told the projected tax threshold for next season will be about $71.6MM. That wouldn't be a huge leap either, but it'd be more significant than the projected cap increase, considering this past season's tax line was about $70.31MM.
As mentioned, we won't officially know 2013/14's cap, tax, and salary restrictions for a few more weeks, but if we assume that Stein's reported figures end up being accurate, what will that mean for the free agent period this summer? Let's examine a few ways that teams and players could be affected…
Despite a modest projected increase for 2013/14, the cap and tax lines are expected to increase substantially for the '14/15 season, according to cap expert Larry Coon. Coon tweets that the current projected figures for '14/15 are a $62.1MM cap and $75.7MM tax line.
Based on those numbers, it's possible we see teams maneuvering to avoid handing out big salaries this season, preferring instead to spend money in the summer of 2014 and beyond, when they'll have more cap flexibility. Additionally, the free agent class of '14 figures to be more star-studded than this year's class, with LeBron James and his early termination option leading a group that could also include Carmelo Anthony, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, Dirk Nowitzki, John Wall, and DeMarcus Cousins.