{"id":121515,"date":"2025-09-05T20:23:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-05T20:23:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/121515\/"},"modified":"2025-09-05T20:23:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T20:23:07","slug":"blazers-have-upcoming-cap-opportunity-but-theres-a-catch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/121515\/","title":{"rendered":"Blazers Have Upcoming Cap Opportunity, But There\u2019s a Catch"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">The Portland Trail Blazers comfortably capped themselves up for the coming season by signing Damian Lillard and trading for Jrue Holiday this summer. But that\u2019s not the last opportunity they\u2019ll have to generate open cap space in the near future.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">Today an author named \u201chooponomics\u201d on the self-publishing platform The Medium <a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/@hooponomic\/portlands-optionality-clock-the-190m-reset-window-e600401b9982\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">went into a complex rundown<\/a> of Portland\u2019s potential future when it comes to generating cap room. It\u2019s the kind of thing you often see with stocks and cryptocurrency with vertices of various data points converging to create the near-mythical \u201cmoment\u201d of opportunity to buy or sell. Speaking for myself, if this kind of thing is real and not just the kind of \u201cnow with L-Zappatine and Added Alphacore!\u201d stuff you read on the side of an energy drink can, it\u2019s over my head.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">The author did bring up a salient point, though. The Blazers still do have the option to clear room on their salary ledger. The golden year would be 2028, when the contracts of Lillard, Holiday, and Jerami Grant all come off the books. The piece tags the amount as $190.36 million, which the author describes as a \u201chistoric\u201d swing. Spotrac <a href=\"https:\/\/www.spotrac.com\/nba\/portland-trail-blazers\/cap\/_\/year\/2028\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">doesn\u2019t go quite that far<\/a>, positing the maximum cap as $182 million and Portland\u2019s max space at $163 million. That\u2019s still a huge amount.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">But there\u2019s a catch. The only player definitively under contract that year is Yang Hansen. In order to generate that much cap space, the Blazers would need to avoid re-signing any of their current players to contracts that run beyond 2028. That would include Shaedon Sharpe, Scoot Henderson, Deni Avdija, and Toumani Camara, to name a few. Portland will also have draft picks eating into cap space between now and then. The likelihood of the Blazers retaining that much flexibility is infinitesimal.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">If we start talking about retaining less cap room, but still a significant amount, we have to consider other teams with the potential to do the same. The Los Angeles Clippers could generate close to $100 million in space that same off-season, the Chicago Bulls almost $80 million, the Brooklyn Nets approximately $60 million. The Blazers might be competing with any or all of those franchises for free agents and stars.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">Long story short, it\u2019s true that Portland has another contract bubble bursting in a few years. It might not make sense to wait for it given the likely climate that summer. The Blazers will have the option to clear significant cap space, but they might be better served making shrewd moves to use it in the interim.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Portland Trail Blazers comfortably capped themselves up for the coming season by signing Damian Lillard and trading&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":121516,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,46315,590,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-121515","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-blazers-analysis","11":"tag-nba","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121515\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/121516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}