Am Afraid'! A Boston Celtics trade dead...

Am Afraid’! A Boston Celtics trade deadline primer

An overview of the numerous things the Celtics cannot do, as well as what they can accomplish before and after February 8.

bias doesn’t imply the Celtics are powerless, but as the deadline approaches, we’ll have to contend with some new limitations.

We’ll begin by going over the trade regulations in general (including the new ones), followed by a breakdown of the Celtics’ tradeable assets,

and lastly, some possible targets for them.

The NBA trade rules are getting more and more complicated.

The NBA’s CBA and the trading regulations have layers, akin to Shrek (or an onion), but let’s start with the fundamentals. The salary cap in

the NBA is a soft cap. Put differently, you can review it (I apologize in advance for the excessive amount of times I’m going to use the phrase

“in other words” in this piece). The Celtics are, according to Spotrac.com and really everything in this story according to the heroes at

Spotrac, about a cool $51.3 million over the cap this season.

Being over the cap restricts the way you can structure deals, but it also important for other reasons that we shall cover later. Put simply,

teams that are over the cap are required to balance the salaries of the players they are trading for and the players whose salaries are going

out.

Still, it’s not a dollar-for-dollar match. If not, trading would be very difficult as you would only be able to exchange for players that have the

exact same amount of money as the player you are giving up. Rather, as per the previous CBA, teams were allowed to retain up to 125% of

their pay that was paid out.

Unfortunately, the new CBA has amended this for teams over a certain salary threshold. That threshold is what’s affectionately known as

the first apron.

The CBA is designed so that the more amount of money you spend, the more punitive the restrictions. The first threshold is obviously the

cap itself. Once you get beyond the soft cap ($136 million). you can’t sign free agents without using an exception. Then you hit the luxury tax

threshold ($165 million) where you have to pay the league for each dollar above the tax line. Then you hit the first apron ($172 million) and

then the second apron ($183 million). At both aprons, different restrictions apply. We don’t have to worry about which apron each

restriction applies because the Celtics are already well past the second apron with total salaries equaling about $187 million, which means

every restriction applies.