post ray cap question

[arctic 3.0]

so we signed terry and were planning on signing ray. that would have allowed us to go over the cap, stay under the lux tax(?) threshold and therefore use the MLE on terry...
now that rays gone how does that effect our ability to sign others?
does that mean we can sign green, pietrus, and wilcox and then apply the mle to terry?
or did allen just screw up danny's roster filling plans?
do we still have the smaller exceptions to work with?

on another note, sean williams... anyone think he will be coming back?

[manl_lui]

good question, I was wondering that as well, cuz we were gonna give him a 2 year 12 mil deal...so whats our cap situation right now? how much can we spend?

[Boris Badenov]

We are in the same situation, essentially.

This does allow us to pay people like Bass and Green more, without hitting the tax apron (and therefore losing the full MLE). But we already have agreements with those guys, so it's really a non-issue.

[Roy H.]

Basically, we can give varying degrees of raises to our own free agents.  Nenad Krstic is the only one we have Bird rights to.

Then, we have one $1.9 "bi-annual exception" that can be used on outside free agents *or* on our own free agents.

[BballTim]

  I doubt that this happens, but they could probably front load Green's contract to get more cap space at the end of his contract.