June 29, 2018

Good resources exist for hard core fans that want to be able to understand how much cap room various teams have: whether it’s Larry Coon’s CBA FAQ for understanding the ins-and-outs for the Collective Bargaining Agreement, or sites like Basketball Insiders that include information on the actual contracts of players, fans can find the info.

But it’s not necessarily easy, and unless you build your own spreadsheet, it’s not simple to quickly see a team’s cap room or how it might change based on their various actions. What if they renounce one of their free agents? What if they stretch a player with a partially guaranteed contract?

That’s why I built the cap calculator. It’s not world-changing, but hopefully it takes something complex and simplifies it, and allows fans to be armchair capologists and play around with various scenarios to see how it would impact their team’s cap room.

You can find the cap calculator on the Cleaning the Glass Stats site by going to any team page using the search bar or the teams directory and then clicking “Salaries” in the menu bar. For example, here is the Lakers’ cap picture. You can see their current cap situation is that they are $31.9M over the projected $101M cap.

Huh? Aren’t they supposed to have all this cap room? The total on the calculator includes their cap holds, which are part of the team salary calculation (more on this at Coon’s CBA FAQ). But teams can renounce some of their holds, and the calculator allows you to see what happens if the Lakers do that. Simply click on Brook Lopez’s row and you’ll see the option pop up to renounce his rights. Bam – all of the sudden you have cap room. You can keep doing this, seeing what happens as you renounce all of the cap holds and even waive some of the Lakers’ non-guaranteed players. At each step the cap space lines at the top of the table update based on your moves.

When you’re done with that, you can see the Lakers now have $59.7M in room. A hefty sum! But not quite enough for two max salaries starting above $30M each. That’s because of Luol Deng’s $18.0M salary. But we could always take the big step of stretching that salary, and see what happens. Click on Deng, hit stretch, and see that you’ve freed up another $10M of cap room. And there it is: enough to sign Paul George and LeBron to max deals.

Want to see what it was like before stretching Deng? Click “undo” next to the transaction on the side of the table and you’re back to where you were.

A few important notes on this tool: