Just days after the opening of free agency, Nuggets are below the NBA salary floor, which the league announced as $84.729 million for the 2016-17 season. But that isn’t a big issue now, and we will get to the reason in a minute.
The salary floor is 90 percent of the NBA salary cap, which has been set at $94.143 million for the 2016-17 season. The luxury tax level is $113.287 million.
The “floor” is the minimum salary a team must spend or be forced to split the difference in payments to players on the roster. The reason it isn’t a big issue this summer is because none of this takes effect until after the season. In other words, the Nuggets’ salary at the end of next season is what matters, not where it is this summer.
With that established, this is what the Nuggets’ salary looks like after the team retained veteran forward -year contract worth $23 million.
Denver’s all-inclusive salary is approximately $66,458,373. This includes the nonguaranteed deals of Joffrey Lauvergne (partially guaranteed Aug. 15), JaKarr Sampson (guaranteed Jan. 10, 2017) and Axel Toupane (guaranteed Jan. 10, 2017).
It also includes the $5,688,000 total of the scaled contracts of first-round draft picks Jamal Murray, Juan Hernangomez and Malik Beasley. Though it remains to be seen whether Hernangomez is signed and will be with the Nuggets during the 2016-17 season, here’s how their salaries break down:
Murray: $2,675,700
Hernangomez: $1,656,200
Beasley: $1,356,100
It doesn’t include a cap hold for Mike Miller because the Nuggets renounced the rights to him. Add it up, and the Nuggets are $18,270,627 under the salary cap. So while they don’t have to move with Usain Bolt-like speed to rectify the situation, they will have to make significant moves to get themselves at least within range of the floor by next April.
