luther

It wouldn't spare us any money. It would actually cost more. But it would give us talent that we couldn't otherwise acquire. Here's a fake version: don't worry about the particulars (such as players I mention), it's just the general gist of it that matters.

Option 1: Trade Theo Ratliff now for Samuel Dalembert. At the end of this season, our salary figure is about $65 million. The cap is going to be about $58 million, so we will be over the cap. However, we have the midlevel exception (under $6 million), biennial exception (under $2 million) and as many minimum salaries as we want, plus the Bird rights of our own players: Telfair, Gomes, Richard and Smith.

Option 2: Let Ratliff expire. At the end of this season, our salary figure is down to about $55 million, but unless we renounce our free agents, their cap holds count against the cap even if we end up not signing them, until either we sign them, someone else signs them or we renounce them. So while our cap number would be a few million below ($3 million won't buy much on the market, mind you. Think Mark Madsen.), it wouldn't matter unless we renounced our own guys--their cap holds alone would eat up that minimal cap space. So now we'd be right near the cap, but still only be able to sign our own guys, use the midlevel, the biennial and minimum-salary guys. In other words, we lose out on $11 million worth of talent in the interest of fiscal responsibility.

The cheapest thing to do is let Ratliff expire, not use our midlevel or biennial exceptions because we'd have to assume Minnesota has to overpay to get anyone here, and just wait another year with no major moves (other than draft pick(s) and maybe re-signing some of our own guys for reasonable deals) and use the cap space we will have after 2008-09. We can go that route and retain flexibility. But it also means another year of probably losing 50-60 games.

I'm not 100% set on trading Ratliff. If we plan to neither trade him nor sign a midlevel player, OK. But if we plan to sign a midlevel player instead of trading Ratliff, I think that's a mistake. We'll end up overpaying to bring that guy here, meaning instead of an $11 million guy, we'd get a $3 million guy who would then make $5.8 million. (Trenton Hassell, Troy Hudson, etc.)