Oklahoma City Thunder: 5 goals for the 2019 offseason

4. Explore all options to use the Carmelo Anthony Traded Player Exception

Maybe the biggest roster-building tool that Presti and the Thunder front office have at their disposal this summer is the Traded Player Exception (TPE) they acquired in the Carmelo Anthony trade of July 2018.

When Oklahoma City traded for Dennis Schroder last offseason, it also received a $10.9 million TPE. The team has until July 25 to use it before it expires.

TPEs are tricky: you can use them to acquire a player whose salary is equal to or less than the amount of the TPE. In other words, the Thunder could not use the TPE plus Schroder to trade for a player making $25 million.

The problem for the Thunder is that most NBA teams aren’t looking to give away a player — especially a productive shooter, which is what Oklahoma City will be hunting for — in return for nothing. There are very few instances where a team is willing to sell off a player without receiving something in return.

The most likely scenario the Thunder could exploit to use the TPE is if another team has an agreement to sign a free agent, but needs to open up more cap space in order to do so. A popular example of this is when the Boston Celtics signed Gordon Hayward in free agency in the summer of 2017. Hayward agreed to come to the Celtics, but Boston needed to shed roughly $2 million in salary to have the appropriate cap space. In the end, Boston traded away Avery Bradley in order to create enough space for Hayward.

If a team in the NBA needs to shed money this summer in order to sign a big free agent, OKC is poised to take advantage of the situation.