Question regarding Salary Cap

So a team can possess what’s called a player’s “bird rights.” This means that if a player has not changed teams in three years through free agency or being waived. If a player qualifies, then the team that the player isn’t reently played for is allowed to surpass the salary cap to sign that player. It basically means that you can go over the cap to resign your own players so long as they meet the criteria.

For example in 2015, the pelicans were over the cap but were able to resign Omer Asik because they had his bird rights. They couldn’t have used that money on anyone else though.

The warriors never surpassed the cap to sign Durant, they actually had to carve out the necessary space because they didn’t possess his bird rights. If the player’s association would have been more receptive to cap smoothing, it would have been impossible for them to sign Durant.

For some reason, Mark Cuban thought it was a good idea to help the record-breaking Warriors out by trading for an often injured, and overpaid player in Andrew Bogut. The Warriors prob couldn't have signed Durant if the Mavs weren't jackass.

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The league created the situation allowing Golden State to sign Durant by allowing the cap increase to happen all at once and therefore a team like Golden State that had all of its stars on either rookie deals or in Curry's case a reduced deal due to injuries.

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no

the league wanted to meter the cap increase over several years. The players association vetoed it. none of GSWs stars were on rookie deals except Barnes who they let leave.

every team suddenly had 20MM + in cap space and many (including the pels) squandered it. Durant chose his team because he could, in a “normal year” a team like GS would not have had that space but that’s not the leagues fault, it’s the players fault

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if we don’t resign boogie, we can’t go and use the money to sign Kawhi or another big name free agent

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That's not how it works..

Moore is definitely worth 8m though.

But the asik, ajinca, and hill deals were definitely due to the predicted cap spikes.

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how ridiculous and stupid it was for the NBAPA to not cap smooth. Everyone should be fired that had any hand in that decision.

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But the league did NOT propose cap smoothing in the way most common sense people would. A common sense cap smoothing would be something along the lines of "We project an 85% increase in the cap 3 years from now so we are going to artificially inflate it 28% each year over the next 3 years." What they proposed was keeping the cap artificially low and giving the excess to the union to distribute to the players.

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This led NBA Commissioner Adam Silver to float a "smoothing" proposal that would deviate with the existing system for determining the cap figure laid out in the collective bargaining agreement between the league and the players, artificially increasing the cap by a smaller amount than the actual revenue numbers would typically demand over the span of a few years. As Silver sold it, all the players would get well this way without causing larger system issues.

"The players would receive every nickel of their 51 percent that year, but we would artificially lower the cap and then make a shortfall payment directly to the union," Silver told Berger.

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LINK

The new head of the union is one of the most hardcore capitalists I've seen. Combine that with the union leadership shifting from an every man role player like Derek Fisher to Max players like CP3 and LeBron, and that kind of commie bullshite was never going to fly. I'm not saying the league didn't want cap smoothing to happen, I'm sure they did, but they got greedy about it and wanted to smooth the cap in a way that wouldn't raise salaries, which honestly seems stupid since the owners were giving up the same total amount of money regardless.

It's just one of those things that both sides messed up when they should have been able to compromise, but I blame the owners more for their stupid "solution" to the problem.