Trade & FA 2023-24: Stein-Ingram Trade Inevitable| LAL Want Lebron Back On Any Terms

[F Gump]

It looks like Cato kind of nailed this (just had the wrong outgoing salary).  Report of the offer to Thybulle at $33mm means he and Curry are splitting the MLE.  GWill is essentially the same as a second MLE created by the S&T.

Spotrac has Dallas at $154.913 with G-Will and without the Holmes TK, the rookies and Thybulle.  So add,

$7.884 Thybulle
$2.733 O-Max
$4.775 Lively
$1.800 TK for Holmes

$172.105 (rounded)

It doesn’t necessarily mean we are done (though we could be).  We just have to take back less than we send out.  If we get Thybulle, a McGee S/W is in play as we will have 15 players.  At 14, it makes no sense because you have to replace him with a minimum slot.  At 15, we can drop back to 14 with McGee out and not be forced to replace him.

So every proposal we look at from here (assuming we get Thybulle) can take back extra salary up to the benefit of McGee’s S/W OR has to be for less money.  For instance, you can’t trade match THJ and picks for Allen unless you include McGee or S/W him.  Charlotte can complete a THJ for PJ deal, but it has to be as an under the cap deal at up to PJ’s hold of $17.4mm for Charlotte to avoid BYC.  BTW, $17.4mm to start fulfills the reported $18mm/year average over 4 years for PJ.  So, lots of things we can do.  We just have fewer ways to do them if we believe the reported goals of moving on from McGee and THJ.

I understand this part >>> "GWill is essentially the same as a second MLE created by the S&T."

But I don't understand the math on this >>>  "Report of the offer to Thybulle at $33mm means he and Curry are splitting the MLE."

Isn't Thybulle 3 yrs 33M? If so, that is about 10.5M to him, and 4.5M to Curry, and well over the MLE. EDITED -- I see now that this was already discussed in the interim. Got it.

But in the bigger picture, I think this post is good thinking, in that they are now more or less full on salary, and any added swap has to be a literal salary match (or even take back a bit less than they send out).

ONE IMPORTANT POINT: Because of the hard cap issue (which they will certainly have), moves may end up being done in a specific sequence. In particular, they are likely to do the Thybulle trade first, and see what happens on the match before submitting Bertans deal, because if POR does match, they suddenly have a lot of room under the hard cap, which means they free up that extra trade spread in the Bertans deal if they have a place to use it elsewhere. IOW there are still multiple moving parts in Mav's cap math.