The other exciting wrinkle from the LaMelo Ball trade is how exactly the Wolves plan to build out the rest of the roster. <\/p>\n
Minnesota is hard-capped at the second-apron payroll threshold because it aggregated salary to bring back Ball and already has $208 million committed to nine players as a result of this trade. That leaves the Wolves with just $14.6 million in wiggle room below the projected second-apron line for the remaining five roster spots that must, by rule, be filled. Remember, even a veteran’s minimum contract costs $2.45 million. (Donte DiVincenzo and Jaden McDaniels have incentives worth a combined $1.75 million that count toward the apron even if they aren\u2019t earned.)<\/p>\n
Ideally, the Wolves would use their taxpayer midlevel exception, projected at $6.37 million, on either a power forward or backup point guard to supplement the brittle Ball. At that point, however, the only way to fill the other four spots would be to sign second-round draft picks Isaiah Evans and Trey Kaufman-Renn for the rookie minimum of $1.36 million. If the Wolves add two veterans at the minimum (or add one and pick up the $2.4 million option on Julian Phillips), they clear the second apron by a cool $150,000 or so.<\/p>\n
Of course, that depends on the second-apron line coming in exactly where we expect when the league finalizes the new cap number during the first week of July. If it\u2019s off on the low side, Minnesota may need to scramble.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The other exciting wrinkle from the LaMelo Ball trade is how exactly the Wolves plan to build out…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":766280,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[434],"tags":[49,48,459,82],"class_list":["post-766279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=766279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766279\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/766280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=766279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=766279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=766279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}