Basically every team that doesn't have enough cap space (approx less than 6 million in cap space), has a "Mid Level Exception". You get one every year, and it's worth the average salary of an NBA player. Right now that amount is about $5 million. So you can either spend that on one player or spread it among two or more guys. Otherwise if there wasn't an MLE, teams that are over the cap couldn't sign anybody but minimum salary guys. And another note, that $5 million is in terms of starting salary, not total contract amount.
Gater, What was that proposed trade deal with Toronto that you were talking about in one of the other forums that would allow us to trade for James without using our MLE on him? I could not quite follow how that worked but there was some sort of rationale on why Toronto would possibly need to to this to stay above/below the cap??? If we could somehow acquire James without using the MLE or we could acquire a player like Jared Jeffries by using the TE, it would help us a whole lot. We have to figure out how to turn that $4.2 TE into a good player. Since we've basically lost Stro's salary, we should be able to afford to add the MLE plus the TE to our salary cap without hitting the lux tax.
