The Traded Player exception that the Portland Trail Blazers picked up from the Allen Crabbe deal last season has expired. What does that mean for the team’s roster-building plans?
The Portland Trail Blazers had until July 25 to utilize a large Traded Player exception they were granted last summer. The deadline passed quietly, and Rip City fans are upset about it.
Portland received the trade exception on July 25, 2017 when it dealt Allen Crabbe to the Brooklyn Nets for Andrew Nicholson. The team had a year to utilize the exception, and it ultimately chose not to.
Traded Player exceptions (TPE) are granted to teams that are over — or will end up over — the salary cap so that they can still complete deals. Teams receive them when they deal a player with a higher salary than what they’re getting back. In the case of the Crabbe-Nicholson exchange, Portland received an exception worth just over $12.9 million.
The Blazers could have used the exception to take in a player from another team whose salary is worth up to that amount. You cannot use a trade exception to sign players, and using it for a sign-and-trade would have made Portland’s fiscal life a lot worse, forcing them into a hard cap for all future transactions this season.
The TPE sounds like an easy way to add a key player to the roster — take in a useful player from a team looking to clear cap room or a positional logjam. With this exception being so particularly large, the Blazers seemed to have an extensive pool of players they could choose from.
However, the reality is that using a trade exception to bring in a player is fairly rare, and most trade exceptions tend to simply expire. Most teams tend to want something substantial in return, even for players they don’t want.
This summer, there were a couple of potential candidates that fit Portland’s still-looming need for another 3-and-D forward and could have had their contract absorbed by the trade exception. Unfortunately, other transactions thwarted those plans.
Wilson Chandler was probably the most likely candidate. The Denver Nuggets were looking to unload him — and several other big contracts — to clear up some financial headroom and a number of positional redundancies. Therefore, they were not looking for much of anything in return.
Chandler will be paid $12.8 million in 2018, which would have fit right under the limit of the exception. However, the Nuggets chose to do business with the Philadelphia 76ers, dealing him along with two second round draft picks and cash for a 2022 second round pick.
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Speaking of the 76ers, had LeBron James or Kawhi Leonard come to town, Robert Covington and his $10.5 million 2018 salary could have been on the way out of town. However, both players ended up with the Los Angeles Lakers and Toronto Raptors, respectively. This likely keeps Covington in Philly as a key part of their title contention plans this season.
Plenty of other players could have financially fit within the Crabbe trade exception. However, most of them are already valuable to their teams as key players and/or cheap contracts. Others that teams may be willing to unload a player, such as New York Knicks 2-guard Courtney Lee or the Sacramento Kings‘ Iman Shumpert, would have created positional redundancy in Portland following the signings of Seth Curry and Nik Stauskas.
Besides, the Blazers should be in the business of shedding salary. The contracts of Meyers Leonard, Evan Turner and Maurice Harkless still loom large on the team’s ledger. All three are owed a collective $38.8 million in 2018-19 despite producing a combined 6.9 win shares in 2017-18.
Sadly, with most teams also at or over the cap, there wasn’t much market for teams willing to take on any of their contracts. The teams that could have, such as the Nets, Lakers and Atlanta Hawks, have chosen to utilize their cap space in other ways.
Blazer fans are particularly upset about what is otherwise a bit of salary cap minutiae because general manager Neil Olshey constantly touted it as one of the assets the team was ready to use this summer to acquire high-level talent. This led to high expectations that were ultimately smashed when the deadline came and went.
It’s moments like these that have heavily damaged fans’ confidence in Olshey being able to turn this team into a formidable Finals contender. The Blazers have certainly made some deals that could prove to be beneficial once the season starts. However, they do look minuscule in comparison to some of deals that other teams in the West have pulled off this offseason.
There’s a sizable chance that, given the team’s cap inflexibility, Portland is done dealing for the summer. However, the team still has a $3.5 million trade exception it received from dealing Noah Vonleh and $1.7 million left on their Taxpayer Mid-Level exception to sign someone else. With a little over a month left before training camp starts, anything is possible.
Still, that $12.9 million trade exception was a key asset that could have been used to acquire a useful player for the 2019 playoff run. Now it has vanished, and this reality has upset a number of fans in Blazer Nation. To them, it feels like the Western Conference around them is getting better while their team stays the same.