Tag: Celtics Salary Cap

As word of a higher salary cap circulate, Boston reportedly plans on ‘spending well into the tax’

Boston and the rest of the NBA may have a little more wiggle room as a result of projected cap figures going up — and they reportedly plan to use it.

The NBA may soon see the expected salary cap for the 2022-23 season rise considerably, with ESPN’s Tim Bontemps reporting it will rise from the previous projection of $112 million to $123.6 million. While the actual number is not quite yet set, the rising salary cap will affect teams around the league.

The Boston Celtics will likely see the value of their mini- mid-level exception (MLE) rise to $6.47 million from prior estimates of around $6.39 million. Over the course of a full three-year MLE contract, that would add close to a quarter of a million dollars, making such a contract just a little more attractive to prospective free agents.

Perhaps more interestingly, the news would lift the luxury tax line by about $1.5 million — and this with more news from MassLive’s Brian Robb that the Celtics are willing to make use of it.

Per Robb’s sources, the team “plans on spending well into the tax” — welcome news to fans who have seen other ball clubs clutch the purse strongs when it comes time to contend.

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WATCH: Celtics super teams and the salary cap – what can Boston do to get better?

Navigating cap issues while Boston tries to improve the team is no easy task.

The Boston Celtics are trying to improve their team in every way they can think of as their All-Star forwards Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum approach their prime years, but they do not have only the other 29 teams in the league to contend with as a barrier to that goal.

The Celtics also have to navigate the ins and outs of the NBA’s strict salary cap rules which are in part designed to prevent teams from building juggernauts too easily, and for the most have worked to keep a semblance of parity in the league. But Boston still wants titles as much as parity seems like a nice thing in the abstract, so what are the parameters new team president Brad Stevens and the rest of the front office are working with?

Watch one of the latest episodes of our friends from the Off the Glass “Hoopsology” podcast to hear special guest Keith Smith of Celtics Blog fame break down what the Celtics have to work with, as well as a host of other offseason issues of note.

This post originally appeared on Celtics Wire. Follow us on Facebook!

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Which salary cap exceptions to the Boston Celtics have to work with this offseason?

Get to know some of the team-building tools Boston has at its disposal.

For much of the previous year and change, Boston Celtics fans have become much more acquainted with the traded player exception than perhaps they would have liked after the decampment of star forward Gordon Hayward to the Charlotte Hornets in the offseason after the 2019-20 season generated the largest ever created in NBA history.

And while the team used some of it to bring in veteran shooting guard Evan Fournier at the 2021 trade deadline, a substantial chunk remains available to be used if taken advantage of before it expires. It’s also far from the only salary cap exception Boston might use this offseason and in their 2021-22 campaign to elevate the prospects of their coming season.

Let’s take a quick look at them all, along with some pertinent details.

Visualizing the Boston Celtics’ future salary cap usage

The Celtics Wire found an interesting new way to visualize the Boston Celtics (and 29 other NBA teams’) future salary commitments each season.

Visualizing the future of the Boston Celtics’ cap usage just got a little easier for those of us who prefer graphic representations with our figures, care of Stephen Spiewak and Vivid Seats.

Spiewak assembled a visualization tool that lets you explore which players make up how much of each of the NBA’s 30 teams’ cap space by season, allowing for a quick and dirty tool to reference each franchise’s distribution of available cap space.

As one heads into future seasons, the space for teams with less financial commitments become clear as names disappear from each team’s circle, and the years and dollars for all players under contract are there at a glance when you mouse over the player’s individual circles.

While the visualizer is more of a cool way to explore the state of each team’s financial commitments than a serious diagnostic tool, it also provides a great means of displaying that data in ways at least some of us will find more amenable to making those synaptic connections stick.

To play around with the visualization tool yourself, click on the link here.

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Celtics player salaries, cap may be impacted by coronavirus

While it’s far too soon to say how just yet, there will likely be some changes in the future of Boston Celtics player salaries, and salary cap structure as a result of the pandemic.

With suspended Boston Celtics and NBA games due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic comes lost revenue, and if those games are not made up, that money goes away, forever.

And if it does, there will be an impact on the structure of not only Celtics future player salaries and salary cap outlook, but across the whole of the league as well.

For now, we don’t know to what extent the events of the last week will change the future of the NBA, but it will impact the league’s bottom line in some way.

To what extent and how the league chooses to respond are perhaps the two biggest issues facing all 30 teams across the NBA, but there’s a lot of factors mitigating things on a team-by-team basis.

What happens to big-market teams compared to smaller-market teams who depend on revenue-sharing, for example?

And if the money distributed into it shrinks along with the salary cap that is based off of basketball-related income (BRI), what happens to teams that would have been non-taxpaying teams, but now are with a diminished cap?

Another issue is how much players get paid — both this season and in the future. While some players earn a set amount, others may see earnings decrease if their contract is tied to a percentage of the cap, as max salaries are.

The league has a provision allowing teams to cut a certain amount (1/92.6th) from player salary in the advent of a massive disruption to games such as we are currently seeing, and this could be enforced if games are not resumed at a later date, reports the New York Times’ Marc Stein, Sopan Deb, Scott Cacciola and Kevin Draper.

Given the league is set to lose as much as $500 million combined for the remainder of the regular season and postseason according to NBC Sports’ Tom Haberstroh, the impact could be significant in a season already seeing a drop in the projected 2020-21 salary cap due to the controversy over Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey’s Hong Kong tweet and China.

With Boston set to be at or near the cap and potentially a taxpaying team in the near-term future, how the league decides to respond to these events could have significant impacts on the team’s future, roster, and player paychecks.

But as with many things at the moment, until we have more data, it will be hard to say how these events will play out in a concrete way as far as team finances and planning will go.

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