I'm convinced they land Lebron and maybe even Bosh. If they do and they get the 4th pick Aldritch or Favors would be my pick. If they get the top pick, I don't care that they have Harris, I would take Walls. Let him tutor a year with the stars under Harris then deal Harris. Great future though, especially if lebron lands there.
I was looking at their cap numbers earlier today. I reckoned they only had $19-24 million worth of cap space next off-season. Only enough for one max contract player + one role player or two $10 million players.
I'm going with the assumption that the cap is not going to free fall all the way to $50 million and is going to land at about $54 million.
So the players they definitely have back will be :
Harris $8.891 million
Jianlian $4.05 million
Lopez $2.413 million
Williams $2.214 million
Lee $1.352 million
Douglas-Roberts $0.854 million
That's a total of $17.557 million.
I'm also going to go under the assumption that they renounce all of the following players:
Alston
Simmons
Battie
Hassell
Hayes
Williams
That leaves Josh Boone, Keyon Dooling and Eduardo Najera.
Boone is a restricted free agent with a qualifying offer of $2.992 million but a salary cap hold of $6.152 million if left in restricted free agency or just has the $6.152 million hold if sent to unrestricted free agency. For this reason, and the fact the have 2 first round picks, I say they let him become unrestricted and renounce him.
Eduardo Najera's salary for 2010-11 and beyond is only guaranteed for $500,000 if released and renounced. He will be.
Alston's salary is only guaranteed for $2.675 million in 2010-11 if released and renounced. Again, he probably will be.
That means we have to add $3.175 million in cap holds to the salary of the players coming back for a sub-total of $20.732 million.
That leaves first round draft pick hold that aren't assigned until the draft pick is made. Given the Nets record I'm going to assume a record of no worse than the second worse record in the league which assumes a draft position of somewhere between 1 through 5. That means their draft hold for their own first pick will be one of the following amounts:
$4,286.9 million
$3,835.6 million
$3,444.4 million
$3,105.5 million
$2,812.2 million
Since they also own Dallas' first round pick and Dallas is looking pretty good I am going to assume a finish somewhere between 21 and 30 for a salary cap hold range of between $1.089 million and $0.851 million. Though the salary cap holds could fluctuate between as low as $2.812 million(the Nets finish with the second worse record and lose the lottery while trading Dallas' pick) to as high as $5.37 million(Nets win first pick in the lottery and Dallas finishes at 21 in the league), I am going to take the stand they end up with 4th overall pick(mostly likely scenario by chance if they have the overall worse record) and Dallas will finish behind Cleveland, Orlando, Boston, Atlanta, LA, Denver and at least one other WC team and give the Nets their #23 pick.
So that's first round cap holds totaling $4.108 million that I will add, though remember, this number can change up or down some $2 million in either direction depending on what happens.
So, Who is right, it looks like the Nets will have about $25 million in salary cap that will include retaining;
Harris
Jianlian
Lope
Williams
Lee
Douglas-Roberts
A #4 pick
A #23 pick.
If the cap is at $54 million, as I suspect and said earlier and they land LeBron he will be limited to a max contract of 30% of the $54 million or $16.2 million in his first year. That is still going to mean that if he is signed their cap figure will be at about $41.1 million and will have $12.9 million in cap space or be able to extend a contract of 5 years and $75 million.
Topic: Nets: Franchise with a Bright Future? (Read 6601 times)