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’s not the last opportunity they’ll have to generate open cap space in the near future.
Today an author named “hooponomics” on the self-publishing platform The Medium went into a complex rundown of Portland’s potential future when it comes to generating cap room. It’s the kind of thing you often see with stocks and cryptocurrency with vertices
of various data points converging to create the near-mythical “moment” of opportunity to buy or sell. Speaking for myself, if this kind of thing is real and not just the kind of “now with L-Zappatine and Added Alphacore!” stuff you read on the side of an energy drink can, it’s over my head.
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 “historic” swing. Spotrac doesn’t go quite that far, positing the maximum cap as $182 million and Portland’s max space at $163 million. That’s still a huge amount.
But there’s 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.
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.
Long story short, it’s 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.
