they could have cut the 27m and kept randal, but with ayo and ball they are paying 62m. they’d have hit the second apron keeping his contracr. right now they are barely below the 1st apron without his 33m contract.

Basically. If they fall below the cap, they lose the full MLE and become a cap-space team. If they’re still over the cap after renouncing the hold and trading Randle, they keep the MLE. That’s why simply renouncing the hold isn’t automatically beneficial.

For this specific scenario, they were able to sign ayo with his bird rights because they were over the cap. if they kept Randal they would have went deeper into the apron. they essentially chose another over Randal and don’t need to thing about the turner contract all that much tbh

Cap holds only count against salary cap. Not against the apron. Because you’re not actually paying the player money

Being over the cap has benefits. By operatin above the cap, you retain the Mid-Level Exception, bird rights ghts to re-sign your own free agents above the cap, minimum salary exceptions, and other roster-building mechanisms. If renouncing a cap hold doesn’t actually create usable cap space, there’s often little reason to do it until it’s necessary. It could potentially have a benefit oke day if they are just above the salary cap and want to create space to sign a free agent. it doesn’t do anything being there negatively ​

I promise if you read enough about it it will all just click at some point lol and then following NBA contracts and salary shenanigans becomes infinitely more satisfying.

The Wolves are confusing. It’s better to look at a team that signed a max free agent recently. Let’s look at my team the Sixers and Paul George for example.

In 2024, we signed PG to a maximum contract with a starting salary of around \(50M. Let’s say the salary cap was \)150M that year. Because we traded James Harden for expiring contracts, going into 2024 free agency we only had like 4 contracts on the books.

Joel Embiid’s \(60M salary, Tyrese Maxey’s rookie scale contract at \)12M, and various role players/rookies totaling around \(30M. That left us with about \)52M in cap space, just enough to sign Paul George out right to a max contract, without needing to trade players or open up cap space.

But this was a very special situation where we had to trade James Harden for expiring contracts and we basically had no other real role players because all that cap space went to Paul George.

These are the situations where you would rescind your cap holds if that makes sense. To sign large free agents outside of exceptions like the MLE, which let you sign one or two players outside of the cap.

My guess, there are advantages to staying over the cap. For example, you get the mid-level exception. I would bet theres only a 1% chance something will come into play for the Twolves, but might as well just keep it on the books

Yes pretty much. Technically you can still sign free agents during the regular season with open cap space but in practice no one actually does that

Its a cap hold, which holds that players bird rights. The player doesnt get paid for it, it costs the owners nothing and has no effect cap wise unless you want to drop below the salary cap, to use cap space to sign or trade for a player. You can remove it anytime from the books. Really theirs no benefits in getting rid of it until you want to drop below cap, do it one of things that GMs dont bother with until they need to. There’s probably some minor benefits on holding to them as well

NBA salary has a few different levels. First is the floor, the least amount cap space you can spend, this is below the salary cap. Next is salary cap, you can use anything below this how you want. Once you are above that cap amount you then move into the luxury tax and the Aprons and have to use exceptions, bird rights, LM contracts to acquire/ keep  players. In the luxury tax your owner owes more money, in the Aprons there are different rules that effect what you can do, what exceptions you have access to, etc. These levels are trying to discourage teams from going well over the salary cap because the NBA really doesnt have a hard cap, but they want the league being competitive, so they dont want the big market teams just buying up all the good players . Overall the Wolves have been working in between salary cap and the 2nd Apron, mostly staying around the luxury tax, so they haven’t been using cap to acquire players, because they’ve been using exceptions and re-signing there players using there bird rights to build there team.