Only comes into play if you can’t remember where you buried the first acorn.

You’re a squirrel. You can fit one acorn in your cheek pouch, for later. It’s not exactly comfortable but you move around more or less normally. You’re set up well for the night.

But you don’t want just one acorn. Two would be better. Two would be delicious. You want to live deliciously.

So you jam a second acorn in there. It doesn’t fit, not really, so you have to contort your head. You can’t see in front of you. Scurrying is replaced by a cumbersome waddle. You are definitely vulnerable to predators, and those other asshole squirrels. But if you can juuuust hold on and get these home, all this might be worth it.

That’s the second acorn. Big cost for potentially big reward.

Because once you go over the second acorn squirrels will ravage your team

Please stop talking about squirrels like you understand them.

Apron rules.

https://sports.betmgm.com/en/blog/nba/what-is-the-second-apron-explanation-nba-bm06/

Team apron tracker:

https://www.spotrac.com/nba/apron/_/year/2025/sort/cap_maximum_space2/dir/desc

there are 3 different acorns, and each one limits what one team can do due to the increased taxation levied on a team for going over each acorn

the second acorn can only be eaten after the first

I’m still waiting for the final acorn to be released in the Acorn Trilogy

You gotta let the other squirrels have some nuts too. 

First acorn is the NBA Cup. Second is the NBA Finals trophy. Knicks don’t like sharing.

tbh the second apron is basically a hard cap on roster flexibility. once you’re over it you lose the MLE, can’t aggregate salaries in trades, and your picks get frozen. Knicks are gonna be right there next season with Brunson’s extension kicking in — that’s why you hear about them trying to move salary. it’s not that complicated once you see it with a real team example

I will now always think of second apron as second acorn.

Early bird gets the worm, slow squirrel gets the second acorn.

I’ve grown cynical, and assume this was intentionally done as bait.

Even so, still funny, so whatever.

This should be good

He doesn’t know how to use the second acorn

The second acorn is so the “blind squirrel” GMs have an extra chance 

a second acorn must be met with a bazooka. small arms return fire will not be enough

It’s a marketing ploy for the new Ice Age

Well you see, none of it matters if you just pretend one of your players planted the acorns and you have someone else pay them on the side.

#BanBalmerAndKawhi

Acorn, a corn, a piece of corn

Wait are acorns, corn?

​Basically, Adam Silver is the Forest King. Every year, he sets a limit on how many acorns teams can spend to pay their squirrels:

​The Salary Cap (~155M acorns): The normal spending limit.

​The Luxury Tax (~188M acorns): You can go over, but you have to pay a heavy tax directly to the King.

​The Second “Acorn” (~208M acorns): The greedy-squirrel limit.

​If your team hoards enough acorns to cross the Second Acorn line, the King doesn’t break up your super-team, but he locks your front office in a financial cage.

​Here is what happens to your team immediately:

-No combining squirrels in trades: You can’t trade three cheap squirrels to match the salary of one superstar squirrel. The trade math has to be 1-to-1.

-No middle-class free agents: You lose your mid-level exceptions. You can only sign outside guys for the absolute “veteran minimum” (a tiny handful of seeds).

-No sweetening the pot: You can’t toss in extra loose acorns (cash considerations) to make another team accept a trade.

​The Ultimate Curse: The King looks exactly 7 winters into the future and freezes your 1st-round draft pick. You can’t trade it. If your team stays over the Second Acorn limit for 2 out of the next 4 years, that 7th-year pick is moved to the absolute back of the 1st round, no matter how bad your team is by then.

​TL;DR: The Second Acorn lets you keep your expensive super-team today, but it completely paralyzes your ability to make trades, sign new free agents, and ruins your future draft picks.

There’s a good visualization of the importance at the start of the film ‘Ice Age’

To get under the acorns, you need to make a peace offering to the squirrel mafia by giving them as many acorns as your team can afford, and whichever team gives the least before the season starting gets hit with the beatdown. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

For you to understand it you gotta understand the progression a little bit. Nba has a salary cap which limits how much a teams can pay their players. There were some exceptions like bird rights mle etc that can help you get over the cap. Once teams find ways to get around the cap limit and go above and beyond the cap, NBA introduced a luxury tax. Luxury tax was for teams who were way above the cap and teams would have to pay double triple the salary to the NBA which in theory would limit the spending power. But some rich owners like Lacob and Ballmer went way into the luxury tax and created more loopholes and NBA then introduced another limitation with first and second appron. They limit your exceptions, drafting and all types of spending.

Eat nuts and kick butts

Im just a squirrel out here tryin to get a nut

the second acorn is  a new set of CBA rules that governs finance ….. squirrel!

You don’t wanna do a second acorn. Because if the second acorn drops on top of a car, a cop may try to murder you thinking it’s a “gun shot” lol. 

Acorn?

You meant Apron right?

….. Right?😅

It’s only available if you buy aghanim’s shard as hoodwink.

Its a Hardcap for Salary. You cannot go above it, no team will ever go above it.

When the first acorn dropped, the police started shooting. Teams don’t want another incident

Why are teams so concerned about this?

It’s a similar concept to a baker’s dozen being 13 items (so if one of the baked goods fell in the mud you’d still have a dozen).

The second acorn is important because if it gets lost you still avoid acornlessness

lol second apron* but i gotchu. basically its a spending limit way above the tax that takes away your mid-level exception and buyout market access. celtics and nuggets are flirting with it rn and teams are scared of getting stuck there

Cops shot the first one so they had to send reinforcements

nice try, squirrel from ice age

NBA talent just doesn’t grow on trees, ya know?

Ask the squirrel

Some squirrels have bigger mouth pouches than other squirrels (some NBA teams make more money & can afford to spend more on players). The squirrels with smaller mouth pouches didn’t think it was fair that some squirrels could fit 2 big acorns in their mouths, so, they made rules that would punish the squirrels with 2 big acorns.

First, squirrels with 2 acorns have to give extra acorn bits to the squirrels that only have one small acorn. But, the squirrels with 2 big acorns were fine with that (2022 Warriors), so, they made it so the squirrels with 2 acorns were not allowed to trade their acorns for larger acorns, they are not allowed to trade as many future acorns (draft picks) for big acorns today, and if they have 2 big acorns for 3 winters in a row they have to pick acorns last next year even if they would normally pick acorns earlier (their draft pick automatically drops to be the last pick of the round).

It’s about limiting flexibility of teams who already have acorns so they can’t take more than their fair share.

Once you have 1 acorn, you’re limited to what you can do with just 1 hand. Once you have 2 acorns, the NBA will force you to drop one acorn and replace it with an acorn of equal size. You can’t trade 1 big acorn for 2 small ones anymore, because you already have 2. Some teams were figuring out ways to have more than 2 acorns at a time by bending rules and the 2 acorn rule puts a stop to it.

Unfortunately that does mean a team can get stuck with an old/injured acorn and be unable to compete, but that’s the risk they took by picking up that 2nd acorn.

I love off-season sports reddit.

This would a been a normal “Using reddit when you could google” slop post but one letter changed that

Damn, Scrat made it to r/nba, confirmed

You have to be careful because if a cop is around the acorn can get you killed.

So the first apron is the maximum salary cap you’re ALLOWED because it’s taxable and you have penalties for roster flexibility to make certain moves for being over the cap. But the first apron tax isn’t that bad for most owners, especially if it yields a contender. The second apron is well over the allowed maximum and is taxed way heavier and on top of that you get the same penalties as the 1st apron plus more restrictions to roster flexibility/ building

No it’s aporn

Just use AI, it can explain basic cap stuff very easily

Edit: I know we are supposed to hate AI, but I found it to be an extremely good use case. Ask Gemini or whatever for the cap situation for your favorite team and see for yourself. I did and found it to be accurate after checking the numbers myself.

Why are teams so concerned about this?

Because it costs owners money, and most are cheap ( as cheap as billionaires can be, anyway ). From a roster-construction standpoint, the second apron barely matters if you have a sufficiently good team to be worth such a payroll in the first place.