How about Gallinari? Sometimes it takes more than 1 season to fully recover from a major knee surgery.
I've thought about him. Wouldn't mind him.
The Gallo of 5 years maybe, not the one I saw playing for the Wizards and the Bucks. He would be a huge liability in our switch all defensive scheme. It's a lot harder to recover from a serious knee injury when you're in your 30s and were never great laterally to begin with.
Just as a general comment, as Celtics2021 said, being above the second apron, we are subject to the following restrictions:
- No access to the taxpayer mid-level exception. These teams can only sign players for the minimum.
- No access to buyout players. If a player's salary at the beginning of a league year is above the non-taxpayer mid-level exception, he cannot sign with a second-apron team if he is waived during that season.
- No aggregating salaries in trades. Basically, you can't trade two $20 million players for a $40 million player, or a $40 million player and a $10 million player for two $25 million players.
- No flexibility in matching salaries through trades. Second-apron teams must send out as much or more money than they are taking back in any trade.
- No giving away cash in trades.
- No sign-and-trading your own players in exchange for other players.
- No trading first-round picks that are seven years away. These picks become "frozen," meaning they cannot be traded, and if a team spends more than two consecutive years above the second apron, those picks automatically move to the end of the first round.
TLDR: If you are a second apron team like us, you're probably stuck with your team, barring minor changes like signing vet min guys. At least for a couple of years, until you make moves to get below it and reset the repeater luxury tax or until your contracts end. It's great if you're a team like us that won, because it's not a bad idea to be locked in to our team - not good if you're the Suns, where you're locked in to a team that got swept out of the first round. They have virtually no ability to make their team better - they can only basically trade like for like money wise because they can't aggregate, they can't use their MLE, can't sign and trade, can't get buyout players...we are the same but thankfully our team should only need small tweaks here and there.
Thankfully the second apron doesn't preclude us signing extensions with our own players, so we should be able to sign White and Tatum to extensions, or in White's case, if he decides to test free agency we should be able to match offers. As for X and Luke who are both free agents, we could match offers for them if Brad felt they were worth paying extra tax for, since we are already over the second apron anyway.
