It's even harder to move a $40M mistake in the new NBA cap environment

how the 'dorf-backed new CBA rules are inadvertently screwing the Bulls

The Bulls are cheap. Everyone rationally can accept this truism. Arturas Karnisovas knew it before he got the job, and reiterated it in his “only I can fix it” pledge after this recently-completed season. In relaying the subjective criteria from ownership that they could go into the luxury tax to keep together a top-4 seed in the East¹ , AK admitted that the Bulls are indeed spending like pretty much every other team, or at least claiming they will if they get that pesky “find good players” situation straightened out.

(this is maddening, of course, given their market size and the now decades of savings accumulated never being good enough to justify spending. But we are stuck with the ‘dorf family for generations.)

With the NBA having a soft cap with many exceptions, teams can wildly outspend eachother. Using Spotrac and their ‘cash’ metric² you can see how uneven the playing field has been lately:

[Aside: I took real liberties with the “Insurance” column. I’m not completely sure how it works , and eligibility is not publicly available information. likely for the reason that it makes the owners look worse. I’m assuming in here 80% insurance reimbursement for Lonzo Ball, Ben Simmons, Ja Morant, Robert Williams III, Steven Adams, Victor Oladipo.]

Again, these are merely assumptions. But I’m pretty sure the Bulls are quietly pocketing millions while crying Lonzo can’t play. This would be a good trade chip for a cravenly-cheap owner, but unfortunately the Bulls are helmed by one.]

This was the final year under many of the old rules, where the Warriors can outspend the Bulls by over 3X without much deterrent, as the penalty was mostly monetary.

To poor-boy owners, this aggression could not stand. I have zero doubt that the ‘dorfs were alongside them in negotiating stricter penalties for spending.

These new rules are all applying this offseason. You’ve likely heard a lot surrounding the biggest spenders (especially the ones already eliminated from the playoffs) trying to reduce payroll to avoid the 2024-25 tax aprons. That’s right, it’s plural now: a 2nd apron has even more financial penalty plus some punitive transaction inflexibility. I won’t go into the many new rules, especially because there’s no way the Bulls will ever need to know them.

But it does affect them. This talk doesn’t appear to be bluster, there is way more of a deterrent at the very top. Enough of a deterrent to where the Bulls high-priced players are not good enough to incur these penalties.

a Warriors deal for LaVine almost has to mean taking back Andrew Wiggins, great…

More simply put: if the Bulls reasoned when signing Zach LaVine to his max contract that the rising cap would mean the contract would look better over time, they miscalculated³. The new rules (that they - likely - championed!) mean that LaVine’s contract is actually worse now.

And this is the Bulls number one problem heading into this offseason.

We know this because AK telegraphed that LaVine is gonna be out of here. And we know from previous reporting and recent history that the Bulls can’t plan multiple things at once and thus “need” to trade LaVine first before assessing what else to do, including how to stay under the tax themselves⁴. I will be hard at work this summer trying to think of plausible LaVine destinations, pretty much for my own amusement and desire for an inflated sense of self-superiority when responding to whatever the Bulls wind up doing.

I happen to think it makes sense what KC Johnson had rumored last week regarding LaVine: teams won’t be scared by the foot surgery that ended last season. At least not any further than they were about his injury history already. That surgery was clearly on the ‘elective’ side, and kept Zach from getting traded midseason somewhere he didn’t want to go. I don’t think they will ‘require’ seeing LaVine on the court before making offers.

There was always the limitation in LaVine destination options at the bottom, where a not-great team wouldn’t be seen as a Zach suitor. Because if giving it even a second thought, why would (say) Orlando, even with their need for backcourt scoring, choose to address that by spending $40M in cap space on LaVine? Now with the new CBA, this makes such work (in so much ‘hypothetical NBA trades’ is work) even tougher in that the top teams are probably not going to trade for LaVine either. The Warriors and Clippers were historically game to add, add, add, but now likely want to reduce payroll, or in some cases may be forced to keep it the same (meaning the Bulls can’t save money, a primary motivator for a LaVine deal).

Spoiler alert: it’s probably going to be the Lakers (still). They are not that close to the 2nd apron, think LaVine is better than he is, and especially if the Bulls use Alex Caruso as a sweetner Lakers management can justify the move to their fans (and LeBron).

Now, on to conceiving of a team that would want to pay Nikola Vucevic $21.5M next season…

1. at least it’s the East! can you imagine if they had to compete outside of the NBA second-division?

2. cap/tax figures use a player’s salary for the full season, not technically what was paid to the players while they were on the teams. This is no matter to the Bulls since they don’t make in-season trades. But you see a lot of trades elsewhere that lower the cap amount (and send cash) but they still had to pay the player to be on the team until they were traded away.

3. LaVine playing like crap, then being disinterested and injured, didn’t help either. But even at contract-year levels he would still be a neutral value at best.

4. Not the second apron, or the first apron, the level where you don’t get that sweet payout