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To get to the pearl, do we need to draft an oyster?

Thanks for sharing!!

They have us in Tier 2: The Mid-level Exception Club. Teams who are not in a position to have cap space but have plenty of room under the tax to use the MLE. They don't state a cap space figure but I actually thought we had a little space. In fact jmmagicfan posted a breakdown which comes out about $7M cap space which seems right.

This is something I posted on twitter but it feels like it's worth sharing here considering the Sengun discussion that came up the other day. Sengun had 69%TS on 26% Usage (while scoring 19ppg) at 18 in a pro league. Here's the list (as far back as the database goes) of freshman in college who played starters minutes and had 65+% TS and 25+% USG: Zion Williamson End list.

So, just a quick review - we do NOT have a lot of cap space to actually work with this summer for free agency. Not counting Bacon, who is not guaranteed until Aug 9th, we currently have $105.3M in salary for 10 players under contract, and "cap holds" for the two, first round picks. The full list/salary are below. The cap is around $112.4M, leaving us about $7M to work with. We do have some other paths to get us some larger options. Resigning any of our own free agents might bring us right up to or over the cap, which means the maximum we would then have to work with would be the Mid-level Exception of about $9.5M. We could do a trade and bring in salary above the cap by using the Trade Exception we got for Fournier, worth up to $17.5M. This might be useful if someone else is trying to create additional cap space to chase a free agent, i.e. the Pelicans to chase Kyle Lowry. To use the TE on a free agent, we would have to work with their "old" team to do a sign and trade, where they do the contract and immediately trade him to us for the TE. I think that is an option. I believe we could also do a sign and trade where we resign Otto Porter, Jr. and immediately trade him for other players/pieces. The list below is the player (age), current jersey #, roster count, 2021-22 salary/cap hold. Player Plyr # Gary Harris (26) 14 1 $20,482,143 Jonathan Isaac (22) 1 2 $17,400,000 Markelle Fultz (22) 20 3 $16,500,000 Terrence Ross (29) 31 4 $12,500,000 Mohamed Bamba (22) 5 5 $7,568,743 Wendell Carter, Jr. (21) 34 6 $6,920,027 Cole Anthony (20) 50 7 $3,449,400 Michael Carter-Williams(28) 7 8 $3,300,000 Chuma Okeke (20) 3 9 $3,277,080 RJ Hampton (20) 13 10 $2,303,040 Rookie Pick #5 11 $6,593,040 Rookie Pick #8 12 $5,007,840 So, just for an example, if we resigned Ennis and Wagner for a combined $7.1M, which puts us at the cap, and gives us 14 players on the roster, our options for adding a 15th player would be one of the following: Mid-level exception - $9.5M, or Bi-Annual exception - $3.7M, or Veteran Minimum, or A trade using one of our trade exception - Fournier $17.1M, Aminu $4.27M, or Clark $2.1M (can not be combined)