re: Which Center would you rather have?

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The Luxury tax # is 69 mil.

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That's not what he means by you can't have $69 million in salary this year. You lose most of your exceptions when you go under the cap which would be needed to sign CP3. Without those exceptions it's not possible to get that far above the cap.

First, if you trade Lopez for Cousins rather than cutting Lopez then you don't have enough cap space to sign Paul. Even if you dump Roberts, Miller and Thomas you still have to have cap holds of $490,000 to get the roster up to 12. So with the minimal cap holds and assuming a $60 million cap you have just $17.6 million to sign Paul, but lets say he takes that. So you're at $60 million and all you have left to offer are minimum contracts and the cap room MLE which is $2.5 million. Chris Paul ate all of your cap space so you don't have the ability to offer Kevin Martin $7.5 million, you can only offer $2.5 million.