Obviously we're very close to the luxury tax and we're finding our "depth" of Gray, Pargo and Hunter is (to everyone's complete shock) not very good.  One way to acquire another player or two without going over the luxury tax threshold would be to find a team over the luxury tax that would like to save money by unloading an unneeded player onto us for James.

Here's a couple examples of how it'd work.

Bulls trade Jerome James ($6.6M, but insurance is covering his contract, so the true bill to the team is only $1.3M).

Bucks trade Luke Ridnour ($6.5M)

OR

Bucks trade Joe Alexander, Fran Elson, Roko Ukic ($5.6M)

In either trade, the salary cap ramifications are basically neutral, but the Bulls go from collecting insurance on James to actually paying that much salary. So the downside for the Bulls is they have to spend more money. But, they actually get players who may be useful.

The Bucks, on the other hand, have little use for any of those players, as none of them but Ridnour play much. Ridnour is actually a useful player, but the Bucks have Jennings, Bell, Redd, and Delfino, as well as Jodie Meeks, to suck up most of the minutes.

By trading Ridnour for James, the Bucks save about $5M. We'd have to spend about $5M

A similar deal could be had with the Lakers. We trade James, and the Lakers trade Adam Morrison and Jordan Farmar. That'd save the Lakers something on the order of $6.5M when it comes to luxury tax bill. Of course, maybe the Lakers are more interested in winning and wouldn't give up Farmar for nothing. But it'd be worth exploring.

Of course, from a Bulls perspective, any of these deals would increase our payroll, even though they wouldn't put us into the luxury tax.