LA Clippers: Understanding the team’s cap this offseason

LA Clippers’ free agents

The Clippers have several free agents, some of which have Non-Bird and Bird rights. What are those? Per Larry Coon:

Bird Rights

"(Bird Rights) allows teams to exceed the cap in order to re-sign their own free agents, up to the player’s maximum salary…These contracts can be up to five years in length, with raises up to 8% of the salary in the first season of the contract."

Non-Bird Rights

"This exception allows a team to re-sign its own free agent to a salary starting at up to 120% of his salary in the previous season (not over the maximum salary, of course), 120% of the minimum salary, or the amount needed to tender a qualifying offer (if the player is a restricted free agent — see question number 42), whichever is greater. Raises are limited to 5% of the salary in the first year of the contract, and contracts are limited to four seasons when this exception is used."

In short, the Clippers can use both of these exceptions to re-sign their own players. Doing so would put them near or above the Luxury Tax Level (Projected to be $132,627,000) meaning Steve Ballmer would have to pay fines.

Here are the LA Clippers’ free agents along with their rights (if they have any):

• Marcus Morris – Non-Bird
• Montrezl Harrell – Bird
• Reggie Jackson – Non-Bird
• Patrick Patterson – Non-Bird
• Johnathan Motley – Restricted Bird

Marcus Morris is probably the most interesting player on this list if only because of his potential salary. With his Non-Bird rights in play, he can ask for quite a bit of money based on his $15,000,000 salary last season. 120% of that puts him in the $18 million range. The Clips can certainly re-sign him along with any of their other free agents but will have to be wary of how much they spend.

Sign-and-trades

Any of these players are also capable of being part of a sign-and-trade but there are caveats to that. The main ones are that the player being traded has to agree to the sign-and-trade, meaning you can’t just say “Hey Trezz, we’re shipping you to Charlotte”. The team you are trading with likely should be over the cap, since trading for a free agent doesn’t make sense if you have the money to pay them outright without giving up assets.

Sign-and-trade deals must be for a minimum of three years with the first year being fully guaranteed. The team taking the player in also cannot use their mid-level exception. For teams above the cap, this means that they must really want the FA and think he is worth more than the full price of their MLE.

The team who is receiving the player in the sign-and-trade also gets hard-capped at the apron level, a set amount slightly above the luxury tax. They can only sign players up to that amount and cannot go over no matter what.

Is a sign-and-trade likely? Brian Windhorst seems to think the Clippers will be aggressive in getting them done. We just have to keep all these rules in mind as we explore potential options.