The NBA’s full-season guarantee date is always an interesting and important one for general managers because it clarifies rosters for the stretch run and sometimes adds intriguing free agents to the market. This unusual season has produced a different calendar but those guarantee decisions happened last week and the most interesting ones all had something in common.
Over the previous few seasons, then-Rockets GM Daryl Morey made a habit of using a small but important collective bargaining agreement wrinkle to keep his team under the luxury tax. Instead of calculating based on what a team actually paid its players over the course of a season, the CBA uses the contracts and salaries a team has at the end of the year so a player traded away in-season has his full salary count on the acquiring team’s books, not at all on the trading team’s ledger.
