July 28, 2017
There was a good story this week on ESPN.com written by Tim MacMahon and Bobby Marks about the NBA’s possible “nuclear summer” next offseason. Basically, 2018 could be the wrong time to be a non-superstar NBA free agent, relatively speaking.
Stay with me, and we’ll eventually bring it all back to the Sixers.
The right time to be a free agent was 2016, when the new television money kicked in and there was a massive salary-cap spike without any smoothing (which the players voted against). The result of the cap jumping from $70 million to $94 million was an incredible $5 billion being handed out to free agents across the league.
Crazy contracts (Joakim Noah for four years, $72 million? Evan Turner for four years, $70 million? Timofey Mozgov for four years, $64 million?) were handed out to non-superstar players all over the NBA, but that trend has already corrected this offseason when “only” $3 billion was given to free agents as the cap only went up to $99 million, less than what the league was originally projecting.
Next summer, the cap is projected to jump to $102 million and ESPN is also projecting that only nine teams will have cap space. Guess who is one of those teams? Your Philadelphia 76ers:
Teams that managed their cap with an eye toward the future instead of prioritizing the present could benefit next summer. Rebuilding franchises with cap space are positioned to pounce on a potentially historic free-agency class, taking advantage of a system that will see the majority of teams over the cap, many hovering near the luxury tax or well into it.
The Lakers are projected to have $30 million in cap space and could create two max slots via trades and/or using the stretch provision. The Chicago Bulls ($50 million projected space), Philadelphia 76ers ($40 million) and Atlanta Hawks ($40 million) are other franchises set up to be aggressive shoppers next summer.
The Sixers will have money to play with because of their insistence on signing free agents to one-year, big money deals this summer. There are still plenty of variables that will determine exactly how much cap space they have to work with next offseason:
• What rotation players are still on the Sixers roster. From here, the biggest variables in terms of creating more space are whether the Sixers could find a taker for Jerryd Bayless’ final year at $8 million and if Jahlil Okafor’s $6.3 million salary is still on the books.
• A possible Robert Covington extension that could realistically see RoCo’s 2018-19 salary at over $10 million.
• What the Sixers’ first-round draft pick ends up being, and whether or not they receive the Lakers pick or 2019 Kings pick after the Markelle Fultz trade.
All of the excitement from Sixers fans has been about LeBron James, which we covered last week. LeBron and the other stars in the 2018 free-agent class (Kevin Durant, Chris Paul, Paul George, Russell Westbrook) are going to get their max salaries regardless of what they do, but unlike a few of the other teams who will have major cap space, the Sixers could sell potential free agents on joining a young core with legitimate high-end upside.
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