With all due respect to Silverstein, February darkness never has me hating everyone. Your trade ideas? Absolutely. But who can be too full of hate at the most glorious time of the year, transactions season?
The NBA trade deadline is Feb. 9, leaving us just a few weeks from knowing in which direction, if any, the Toronto Raptors will decide to shift. A year ago, the team effectively traded down 13 spots in the NBA Draft to land Thaddeus Young, who they later re-signed. This deadline figures to more significantly shape the future of the franchise.
Transactions rule, and so you’re well within your rights to be firing up your trade machine of choice. Before you do, we have to go through the dry part of the trade calendar: My annual deadline primer.
What follows is an explanation for the different assets the Raptors have available to them, the rules regarding trades under the Collective Bargaining Agreement and other areas of clarification people have asked about, recently or historically.
Current and Future Cap Sheet
The Toronto Raptors’ cap sheet looks more or less the same as it did entering the year, other than swapping out Justin Champagnie for a Joe Wieskamp 10-day contract. Here’s how things look:
For the current season, there’s not a ton to glean. The most notable row above is the red “dead salaries” row. The Raptors have spent $3.14 million on players no longer on the roster — the full $1.88 million owed to Svi Mykhailiuk, smaller partial guarantees for Champagnie, D.J. Wilson, Armoni Brooks, and Ishmail Wainright (from 2021-22), plus a small charge because Raptors 905 guard Saben Lee was signed-and-waived for G League purposes once the season’s salary clock had already begun. For a team well below the tax and in a non-contention year, $3.14 million is a completely reasonable use of space to have a competitive summer program and training camp if it helps you find your next end-of-roster developmental piece.
The cap snapshot is more useful to keep in mind longer-term. As currently constructed, the Raptors project to operate as an above-cap team this summer unless Fred VanVleet, Gary Trent Jr., and Otto Porter Jr. all decline player options and leave as unrestricted free agents. The Raptors have been a non-cap space team for years, left to utilize exceptions, trades and picks to keep building, to mixed effect.
Here’s how the 2023-24 cap sheet lines up, with two key numbers:
The first important number is $148.68 million. That’s what the Raptors have committed if all three players with player options exercise their options to stay with the team, the Raptors hold on to the (projected) No. 7 pick, and they opt to walk away from Young’s small partial guarantee. The cap is currently projected to rise to $134 million next year, meaning that with adding just their first-round pick, the Raptors are well above the cap, with about $13 million in wiggle room beneath the luxury tax to round out the roster.
Right below that number is $94.25 million, which is how much the Raptors would have on the books if all the player options were declined and they traded away (or stashed) their top pick. This is your “max cap space” determinant. The Raptors would have a little under $40 million in cap space before accounting for minimum contracts (or roster charges) to meet the roster minimum. The smallest max contract for this summer projects to begin at $33.5 million in Year One and would start as high as $46.9 million for an experienced veteran.
In other words, even watching all the players with options walk away doesn’t leave the Raptors with space for a max contract unless they’re willing to make further aggressive concessions.
Because of that, one of the bigger questions facing any sell-off for the Raptors is whether they’d be willing to eat longer-term money to improve the asset return.
As an example, dealing Trent for expiring contracts probably won’t return as nice a pick or prospect as dealing Trent for a player owed money beyond 2023 would. Since the Raptors’ path to meaningful cap space this summer would require a large (and careful) dismantling of the current roster, the more fruitful path will likely be maximizing asset value and operating as an above-cap team again. The opportunity cost of that lost cap space is minimal the more difficult your path to cap space is to begin with.
The complicated question that flows from that cap-space reality is how the team would go about replacing outbound talent as they retool for next season. Draft picks are great but rarely contribute meaningfully to winning right out of the gate. If the goal is to return to being a legitimate playoff threat in 2023-24, the (potential) final years on contracts for Pascal Siakam and O.G. Anunoby, how will the Raptors complement that pair and Scottie Barnes without cap space? Trades are always a possibility, but we’ve seen that mid-level and minimum-type signings aren’t reliable enough supplementary chips.
Any deal involving Trent or VanVleet then, may prioritize young, rotation-ready players more than draft picks deeper into the future. It also somewhat paradoxically adds value to taking on longer-term money in some instances, as the Raptors could use those contracts for salary-matching in future deals (though we quickly get into a temporal trade loop chasing that logic too far).
All of that is to say that while Siakam, Anunoby, Barnes, Chris Boucher, Precious Achiuwa and Christian Koloko are a nice group to be building with, it’s not enough. Removing Trent and/or VanVleet from that core without the cap room to chase another star this summer or even replace the production of that starting backcourt puts significant pressure on the Raptors to nail these trades.
Then again, holding both and re-signing them to larger deals after they opt out in the summer would make the Raptors a borderline luxury-tax team with few paths to improving. (VanVleet and Trent re-signing with a combined 2023-24 salary of $50 million would basically have the Raptors at the tax after using a smaller exception and filling out the roster. The team is currently 19-24.)
Their situation is, uh, complicated.
Luxury Tax
A significant source of flexibility in trade for the Raptors this year is that they have $4.45 million in wiggle room underneath the luxury tax.
The Raptors won’t spend into the tax in a non-contending year, so that $4.54 million is effectively the amount of money the Raptors can add to facilitate a deal. For comparison, the Raptors were an estimated $18,541 under the tax line at last year’s deadline, necessitating cap neutrality (at worst) in any deal.
Technically, the Raptors could go into the tax if the right deal is there. That’s not something they’ve done except during the championship season. League-wide tax projections for this season are quite high, and the luxury tax paid by tax teams is split between the non-tax paying teams, so staying below the tax keeps the Raptors in line for their share of a large tax payout pie.
Luckily, the wiggle room beneath the tax here is ample, given the salary-matching rules around trades.
Other tradable assets
In addition to players, the Raptors have some other trade assets available to them.
Cash: Teams can send and receive $6.36 million in total this league year. The Raptors haven’t touched those amounts yet, so they can sweeten a deal, or have one sweetened for them, with a briefcase full of cash.
Draft picks: The Raptors have their full allotment of first-round picks, meaning they can trade any from 2023 all the way to 2029 (teams can only trade picks up to seven years out). League rules prohibit a team from trading consecutive future first-round picks, so the Raptors can’t deal all of them, but that’s seven firsts to choose from, with a max of up to four that can be dealt. The Raptors have traded away their 2024 second-round pick (in the Marc Gasol trade), leaving them 2023 and 2025-2029 to offer.
Player rights: The Raptors hold the draft rights to DeeAndre Hulett, a 2000 draft pick who never saw the NBA. These rights still hold a sliver of value because NBA rules dictate that each side has to send something in any trade, and so outdated draft rights can work as a sort of currency. The Raptors also hold free-agent rights on Nando De Colo, Lucas Nogueira, Jason Thompson, Jeremy Lin, Jodie Meeks, Isaac Bonga and David Johnson, but those rights are not eligible to be traded.
Trade restrictions
Every player on the Raptors is currently eligible to be traded.
Salary matching
The rules around trades change depending on the size of the trade and whether a team will be in the tax after a deal is done.
For tax teams, it’s simple: You can take back 125 per cent of the salary you send out, plus $100,000. Teams beneath the tax operate under different restrictions depending on the size of the trade, as outlined below.
A more helpful way to look at this may be to examine different player combinations to see what amount could come back. (Note that cash, player rights and draft picks do not count for salary matching.) I picked a few salaries at different tiers and a few combinations for no reason other than to highlight what salary matching looks like at a few different levels.
While the trade has to satisfy the above criteria for both teams, there is some wiggle room in how trades are structured so that each team involved can suit their own needs.
Exceptions
There are three exceptions teams can use to get around the salary matching rules in trades.
Disabled Player Exception: Teams can apply for one of these if they lose a player for the year. The Raptors recently applied for a DPE for Porter that would give them a $3-million exception to sign or trade for a player. As of this writing, there is no word if that has been approved by the league, though there’s no reason to think it won’t be.
Minimum Player Exception: Teams are always permitted to acquire minimum-salary players so long as they have the roster space.
Traded Player Exception: A traded player exception allows a team to take back a salary that matches an existing exception, plus $100,000, without sending matching salary out. The Raptors have a $5.25-million trade exception from the Dragic trade that they could use to absorb $5.35 million in salary.
These exceptions can’t be combined with each other or combined with player salaries. That is, the Raptors can’t take their $3-million DPE and $5.25-million TPE to take back an $8.25-million player, they could only take back a $3-million and a $5.25-million player.
Two-ways
Two-way contracts are allowed to be traded. They don’t count for salary matching and can’t create a trade exception, nor do they count against the cap or tax.
The NBA loosened the rules for two-way player availability over the course of the last few seasons, with one exception: If the Raptors want to use a two-way (say, Jeff Dowtin Jr.) in the playoffs, they’ll need to convert him to a standard roster spot by the final day of the season, or negotiate a new multi-year deal with the player. The Raptors have a chunk of their mid-level exception from this past summer remaining, which maintains the option to sign Dowtin (or whomever) to a three-year deal rather than the usual two-year cap for minimum players. (Note: That exception is only for signings, not for trades.)
There is no deadline for signing new two-way contracts this season, so the team could theoretically convert Dowtin and then sign a new two-way player into his old spot, or cut Ron Harper Jr. in favour of another two-way at any time.
The TL;DR version
— The Raptors have multiple players, picks, and cash to send in deals.
— Their cap situation for this summer suggests they should be willing to take on longer-term money even in a sell scenario, if it improves the assets coming back.
— Their cap situation for this summer also almost necessitates they bring back roster players in any sell-off move, as they have no obvious path to replacing outbound rotation pieces beyond the draft and smaller free agency exceptions.
— The Raptors have $4.54 million in flexibility beneath the luxury tax.
— The trade deadline is Feb. 9 at 3 p.m. ET.
Between now and the deadline, I’ll be evaluating your fake Raptors trades, as I always do. I make no promises to be gentle, JD.
