Photo by Steph Chambers/Getty Images Sometimes NBA realities are no fun. The Portland Trail Blazers are in an unpleasant situation as they enter the Summer of 2024. Their draft picks are modest, their tradable assets few, and their cap space nonexistent. One Blazer’s Edge Reader wants to know how we got here, at least as far as the salary cap goes. That’s the subject of today’s Blazer’s Edge Mailbag. Hi, Dave, Given the youth and overall player quality on Portland’s roster, it seems inconceivable that they remain perpetually in salary cap hell. Does the matching salaries trade requirement make it impossible for the team to get past the summer of Crabbe/Leonard/Turner/Harkless/Ezeli? Oris it just that they keep shoveling every possible dollar at great and less than great players (Dame, CJ, Simons, Grant, etc)? Is the only way out to let all substantial contracts expire without making commitments to any players of value and THEN start the rebuild? The team just seems to be on a treadmill it can’t get off. Thanks! Bill The picture gets clearer when you remember that one year ago today, most of the Trail Blazers universe was still talking about how to build a contender around Damian Lillard. The past season seemed to last an eternity, but the Lillard trade request news broke after the 2023 NBA Draft. We’re not at the anniversary of the announcement yet, let alone the actual trade. With Dame making $40-$45 million per year during the second half of his career, there’s no way the Blazers were falling below the salary cap at all, let alone to the extent necessary to sign significant free agents. If the cap stood at $112 million and a good free agent cost $20 million, that would have left around $50 million for the other 13 members of the roster besides Lillard and the new signee. That wasn’t possible, especially with guys like CJ McCollum and Jusuf Nurkic on the team. Both mission statement and finances conspired to keep the Blazers in the happy zone between the salary cap line and the luxury tax threshold for most of the decade Lillard served with the team. That made maximum use of their (fiscally responsible) spending ability while retaining maximum talent. Obviously the situation is different now, but you can’t turn a battleship like a speedboat. When the Blazers traded Lillard’s enormous contract (and Nurkic’s in parallel), they had to take back salary in return. No team that Lillard would actually play for would have the cap space to absorb him outright. The Blazers actually did a decent job of separating their former big contracts into smaller ones that would expire at different times. None of those ended this year, but Malcolm Brogdon is coming up next year, Deandre Ayton and Matisse Thybulle the year after. Anfernee Simons’ contract also expires two years from now. Failing to sign him, or even Jerami Grant, would have cost the team opportunity and a potential future trading chip. For perspective, we could wipe Grant’s $30 million contract off of Portland’s ledger right now and they still wouldn’t have cap space next year. Under those conditions, having a player of his caliber is better than not. That may change a couple years from now, but they had to sign the deal when they did. The same is true of all the past players who gummed up Portland’s salary cap. Some signings were better than others, but the alternative to being over the cap right now would have been turning to Damian Lillard 2-3 years earlier and saying, “We’re blowing up this team to generate future cap space.” That would have precipitated the collapse before its time. It also would have gotten the front office lambasted from Pioneer Square to the halls of ESPN and everywhere in between. It’s truly icky to watch a team winning 21 games spend like one winning 51. The Blazers probably don’t want to be in this position either. But that’s where they’re going to stand for another season at least, and maybe a bit beyond. Eventually they’ll cycle the roster into younger, cheaper players. They’ll have an opportunity to generate cap space and sign free agents at that point. Not today, though. It’s not fun, but it’s understandable. Thanks for the question! You all can send yours to [url=mailto:blazersub@gmail.com]blazersub@gmail.com[/url] and we’ll try to answer as many as possible! Source: https://www.blazersedge.com/2024/5/23/2 ... ton-simons