Oh...I was under the impression that they could be used to acquire players in some way, hence Dawson's comment about them being vital to teams that are over the cap. EDIT: I think I get it now.
You can acquire players with a TE. You trade it, straight up, to other teams for players. So let's say Philly wants to dump Steven Hunter's salary. They can either trade for a 2nd round pick (unguaranteed contracts) or for our trade exceptions. We get the player, they dump the salary. We got Mike James with a TE two seasons ago because Milwaukee was trying to get cap space that summer.
I don't want to sound like i'm reading too much into is but hasn't the prevailing thought been we will have to dip into the MLE to bring over V-Span then attempt to use the remaining MLE to sign another player? This article makes it sound as if we will target one individual player with the MLE, as we did last off-season with Swift. Maybe its possible for us to bring over V-Span without touching the MLE? That certainly would be nice.
CD often let's the trade exceptions simply expire, so I will not hold my breath that we are actually going to use them, but I hope we do. DD
I've been contradicted about the trade exceptions before, and maybe will again (even in this thread?), but I'm pretty sure the TE can work as such: For example, pretend we're trading for a player making 10 million next year. We don't have 10 million dollars worth of players that we can trade without completely gutting our depth. But we can use the 4.2 mil TE from the Mooch trade. We can trade away approximately 5.8 million worth of players (say, Stromile and Luther) and use the TE as well. (I say "approximately" because I'm sure you can still be within 15% of matching the salaries, even using the trade exception). The trade exception might come in really handy if we trade for that much-needed "third option".
You can't trade a TE with any players involved and (from what I understand) you can't combine TE's. Now, there are ways around these rules like the Mike James trade for instance. It was actually two trades I believe - TE for Hamilton, Gaines for James. or vice-versa.
I'm pretty sure you can't combine TEs with your own players in a trade. We'd have to have a $10 M trade exception to get someone else's $10 M per year player...
I have seen different answers from very reliable sources. Here is my take... We all agree that a TE can't be used to sign FA's. Where it gets a little hazy is the part the says "it can't be combined with any other exception". Obviously then, we can't use a Mid-Level Exception of $5m and a TE of of $4.2m to trade for a player worth $9.2m. All of that is easy and logical. The combination part I mentioned above is in reality "can't be combined with any other exception to obtain a single player". That means we could use the APE (Assigned Player Exception now up from +/- 15% to +/- 25% in the current CBA) to obtain a single player and then use the 4.2m TE on another player as part of the same deal. (As others have mentioned, that is the logic behind Reece Gaines for Zendon Hamilton and Mike James). This is where intelligent people disagee. If you don't use the +/- 25% APE, can you use exact salaries + the TE to obtain a single player? IMHO, yes...but I have seen contrary arguments. It should go without saying that any unsigned draft picks have $0 worth of salary trade impact.
No. The TE can only be used for a single player. See GATER's post above if you would like to add to your level of confusion on this subject.
