Trade & Free Agency 2026/2027

[HoosierDaddyKid]

There was a lot of talk about the second apron. Can you explain what the second apron is? Dan Rube: The second apron is a new payroll threshold that was put into this latest CBA [collective bargaining agreement]. And it adds, for the very highest spending teams, greater transaction restrictions and penalties than we’ve previously had in other CBAs. To get a little more specific, the transaction restrictions that apply to teams that have payrolls above the second apron level, they relate to adding new talent. For example, if a team is above the second apron, it can still sign contract extensions with its players and use the Larry Bird salary cap exception to re-sign its players as free agents. What you can no longer do if you have a payroll above that level are things like what we call the mid-level salary exception to bring in a new player or trade several lower-salaried players away in exchange for a single player making the sum of those salary amounts and going above the second apron by even more with transactions like those that add new talent. Where is that second apron threshold set? It increases every year in proportion to other system levels, but for the upcoming season, it’s at $222 million. And that means that for those consequences that I described to apply to a team, they’d have to be spending more than $57 million above that $165 million salary cap or more than $20 million above the $200 million tax level. And just to give you a sense of the size of the group the new rules are targeting, historically, until shortly before this CBA, on average per year, we had about two to three teams spending at that highest tier.
Over the past eight years, we’ve had eight different champions, and we haven’t had back-to-back finalists in about that same amount of time since the Golden State Warriors played in back-to-back Finals in 2018 and 2019.


NBA.com