In the East that’s easily a playoff team, my over/under will be 47,5.

FWIW
Once the details are finally defined,
Pelton gave us a B and Dallas a C-, Duncan and Laroux think the FO did a nice job even if Laroux call us “right now from a basketball prospective an empty canvass”, while the guys at 538 had only partial info at the time of their roundtable (and some of them suffer from PTSD being former Knick’s beat or fans, just like us).

Duncan & Laroux released (Patreon subscribers only) the updated cap situation,
using 1st pick value for projected draft expenses (Zion will get 9.65 Mil in the first year), including roster charges for empty roster spots and the dead money for Noah and LT (1 Mil guaranteed).

I’m a bit surprised, it’s less then I thought:

69,5 Mil even declining Trier option and with only 6 players signed (Knox, MitchRob, Frank, Dot, DSJ, 1st, we could resign Kornet and Vonleh later in different ways).

Max contracts for KD and Kyrie sums up around 71 Mil so there’s still work to do but I’m sure they’re counting pennies and dimes to try it…

P.S.
Or they could take slightly less then the max to join forces… they just need to renounce 1 Mil each 🙂

As an aside, what the fuck is up with the shitty Pistons? Barely beating the Mavs with such a short roster (and no Luka). With the win, they’re still just 22-28! Dang! And yet they’re just two games out of the playoffs. Double dang!

Thanks for the info. I didn’t even look into it myself, I just assumed the dudes reporting it knew what they were talking about. My mistake there. Seems like they can get pretty much there, though, by simply not drafting #1, right? I mean, of course, we want them to draft #1, but I mean if they draft even #2, that opens up the extra $1.4 million they’d need to get to $69, right?

But yeah, that would mean only having the room and so it’d be Vonleh or another guy instead of Vonleh and another guy.

Still, in such a scenario, obviously we know that there are decent guys willing to take the vet minimum to play with KD and Irving, so I don’t think it changes the math too much on what we can expect from next year’s team (by the way, if they did get the #1 pick, then I bet it’d be even more likely that KD and Irving would be willing to shave $700,000 each off of their deals to play with Zion, ya know?)

Add a cap hold for our 1Rp – if no 1 that’s close to 10m.

Five empty roster charges – another 4m. So 42m and a cap of 108. About 66m in room. A ten year max and a 6-9 year max come to about 69m, though you can net two roster charges off that (67.6). Basically, to fully max KD and Kyrie they’d have to take slightly under the max or we’d have to release trier or resign him under the room exception, although it will be easier if we pick lower.

KD and Kyrie to NYC? Why the Knicks’ Kristap Porzingis trade left rival execs – and perhaps even the Celtics – thinking it was more possible than ever https://t.co/5MaN2vbNh1— Sam Amick (@sam_amick) February 1, 2019

Let’s say that the Knicks get Irving and Durant. That’d be amazing, of course. That would still leave them with, like, $5 million, I believe. You could probably re-sign Vonleh and then use the room exception to get someone else decent (or reverse that and sign someone else and use the room on Vonleh).

Let’s say they get, I dunno, Barrett (I figure he’s a nice medium result between great and terrible lottery luck).

So your starting five is:

Irving
Trier
Durant
Knox
Robinson (maybe you start Vonleh to keep Robinson out of foul trouble early?)

with Barrett, Frank, Dotson, DSJ, Vonleh, room exception guy A, re-signed Kornet (he’d be restricted and they can use up to the mid-level on him to bring him back, so he’ll be back) and a couple of vet minimum guys/undrafted picks.

How many wins do you think that team gets next year? That’s not a rhetorical question, I’m curious as to what people think.

By the way, KP’s qualifying offer lowered to just $4.5 million due to time missed. Therefore, is that serious leverage? “I’ll take $4.5 million and hope for $150 million the following instead of just taking the $150 million now!” Seems like BS.