We are less than two weeks removed from the Denver Nuggets being crowned NBA champions for the first time in franchise history, and yet the rest of the league has moved on to next season. We already have the first blockbuster trade of the off-season. The Washington Wizards will send Bradley Beal and role players Jordan Goodwin and Isaiah Todd to the Phoenix Suns. In return, Washington will get Chris Paul, Landry Shamet, and multiple second round draft picks and swaps. The Beal trade will have several direct and indirect affects on the Minnesota Timberwolves.
The most direct is that the Suns added a third star, which will make their offense even more lethal and hard to guard. They already looked like they were going to be one of the best teams in the West next year with Devin Booker and Kevin Durant. Additionally, it allows them to replace the aging Paul with a younger player. Theoretically, they have a better chance to stay healthy deep into the playoffs, although Beal has his own injury history. The West will likely be even stronger next year. The Wolves will enter the season with good health and extra continuity, but so will many of the teams who were already in the top 10 last season.
The other parallel between Phoenix and Minnesota is roster construction. Both teams made a massive trade last season. They used all of the future first round draft picks available to them to obtain a max contract superstar with multiple years left on their deal in an attempt to enter a short championship window. However, both teams made their trades before the NBA announced its new collective-bargaining agreement (CBA). While the CBA renews every few years, teams really have no way to know what is going to be agreed upon in the contract until it happens.
The primary issue is that the league implemented a second level to the luxury tax for teams well over the salary cap. In the past, a team over the salary cap faced some small barriers, but still had a fair amount of flexibility to improve their roster, including the mid-level exception and trade exceptions. If you went well over the cap, you would enter the luxury tax, meaning that you’d have slightly more contract restrictions for signing free agents. However, the primary deterrent was that teams would have to pay an additional fee on top of their free agent signing’s contracts, which was multiplicative for every year you stayed in the tax.
The luxury tax prevented most small market teams from spending over it. However, teams like the Golden State Warriors, who have an incredibly profitable stadium, and the Clippers, who have one of the richest owners in the league, essentially ignored the luxury tax. They’ve had one of the highest payrolls in the league for several years in a row, because money is not an issue to them. This type of behavior led ESPN’s Brian Windhorst to call Golden State’s championship two years ago a checkbook win. Although Windhorst got criticism for the statement, he was right in many ways. The league seems to have silently confirmed it, too, given their actions.
Now, the NBA has added what is being referred to as the “second apron” to the CBA. The second apron is essentially a second luxury tax threshold that will be much more restrictive than the initial luxury tax. While there is a lot more to it than can be expressed in a short article, a few elements will be relevant to the Wolves and the Suns very soon.
The first is that once you are over the “second apron,” you can no longer trade multiple players for one player, preventing teams from stockpiling stars by trading away a handful of role players or young prospects. Additionally, the multiplicative tax for re-signing your players when over the “second apron” tax will be even higher. However, potentially the most prohibitive part of the second apron is that, per John Hollinger, “teams will not be able to trade a first-round pick seven years in the future, limiting the haul available for Durant-style blockbusters. More importantly, perhaps, if those teams stay above the tax apron in more than one of the next four years, the pick gets pushed to the end of the first round in the year in question … regardless of where the team might finish.”
That will make it much harder for teams who stay in the second apron to rebuild quickly after their glory years are over, or their experiment crashes and burns like it did for the Brooklyn Nets last year. While some teams may find ways around the new CBA’s restrictions, it is so limiting that Hollinger refers to it as a “soft hard cap” because most teams will rarely ever go beyond it.
While it’s true that it may not be smart to breach it, not everyone is taking it as a hard cap because the new eccentric billionaire in town Mat Ishbia bravely doubled down on crossing into the second apron by trading for Beal. Remember, this is a man who thinks he is so untouchable that he can wrestle with Nikola Jokic for a dead ball during a playoff game. Unfortunately, because the NBA took no stance on his inappropriate behavior but gave Jokic a technical foul, I fear they’ve only fed into his ego.
Still, as much as I have a distaste for Ishbia as a person, I appreciate this move as a challenge to the new CBA. I also appreciate his willingness to be the test subject for what happens if you ignore the cap completely. If the Wolves retain Karl-Anthony Towns or Rudy Gobert while Anthony Edwards‘ max contract and Jaden McDaniels near-max kick in, then they will be well over the tax like Phoenix.
Of course, both teams will have some time to dabble in the tax a bit before the restrictions hit them hard. Much of the new CBA does not take effect until the 2024-25 season. Still, it will not ultimately not be sustainable to stay over the “second apron” for several years if the frozen draft picks are as prohibitive as they seem, and your owner isn’t willing to spend a substantial sum of their fortune on luxury tax payments.
There’s no immediate reason to panic and worry about the future for Phoenix and Minnesota’s front offices. Both teams have about a season and a half to test the water in the second apron and see how good their team is before they make a decision on whether or not to stay in the second apron. If either team makes the Western Conference finals next year or wins the championship, it will be enough for them to consider dipping into the second apron for one year even after the draft restrictions go into effect.
At the very least, both teams will also have over half of the 2024-25 season to decide whether or not they need to escape the luxury tax. Unless it’s been changed in the new CBA, a team can start the season over the luxury tax. As long as they get under it again by the end, they do not have to pay the financial ramifications associated with the tax.
The point is that there was a ton of criticism surrounding the Suns acquiring another super max player on a gigantic contract because of what it could mean for their future. However, they have at least two years with a championship-quality roster before they absolutely have to change course. And if they do have to blow things up after, they still have Devin Booker to lead their team, who is still only 26. If they want to trade Durant for draft capital once the apron becomes prohibitive and build a less superstar-heavy team around Booker, they can.
Similarly, the Timberwolves are not as doomed as some of the national and local media make them out to be. Sure, you made a trade mortgaging your future draft capital for an aging center who might be on the decline, and the Wolves still likely aren’t as close to winning a championship as the Suns. However, their long-term future might be much brighter, because you could argue that Ant and Jaden were Minnesota’s two best players last year.
Ant proved he can run an offense and win enough to make the playoffs with a bunch of defense-oriented players around him while KAT was injured. Jaden proved that he can make almost any star in the league have an off scoring night. He has enough of an offensive bag that he could eventually be a key scorer himself. On top of that, if the Wolves are able to retain Naz Reid this offseason, they have a starting-quality center waiting in the wings if they need to overhaul the roster.
I know it sucks to not have draft picks after being in the lottery for like 20 years straight. There’s no news in June, and Timberwolves fans we’ve gotten used to diving way too deep into the draft. However, the future of the Wolves is still brighter than it’s been in a long time. We still have no idea how prohibitive the second apron will actually be, especially if you only stay in it for one year.
If you’re going to wind up over the second apron for one year anyway, you might as well go as far over it as possible if it means increasing your odds to win a championship. That’s the philosophy the Suns are following for the next two or so years. It is also the philosophy the Wolves will have to decide whether or not they want to follow themselves, whether it’s on draft night in two days, or when the new CBA actually takes effect.
