Trail Blazers' Rebuild Comes as CBA Reshapes NBA Roster-Building Strategy
The way NBA teams do business is changing rapidly. Here's how that could affect Portland in the coming years.
Outside of drafting Donovan Clingan and trading for Deni Avdija, it’s been a quiet summer for the Trail Blazers.
They’re not the only ones.
As NBA teams adjust in real time to the salary and roster-building rules of the new collective-bargaining agreement that went into effect last summer, the league’s norms are changing when it comes to trades and free agency.
This summer, after a one-year grace period, the highly restrictive new luxury-tax system is being introduced. My friend and colleague Jake Fischer of Yahoo Sports has a more thorough explanation of the rules here, but in short, teams that spend over a certain threshold are severely limited in being able to do things like trade multiple players for one player or sign any free agents for more than the minimum, and in some cases even have future draft picks frozen.
A few teams like Boston, Phoenix and Milwaukee have gone over that line and seem willing to live with the consequences, but for the most part, front offices are going out of their way to avoid it, and it’s had a far-reaching effect on what kinds of trades and free-agent signings teams are willing to do.
It’s going to take several years for everyone to truly grasp the effects of the new system, but the early verdict: owners have effectively gotten the hard cap they’ve wanted for almost 30 years.
It’s certainly an interesting time for a team like the Blazers to be rebuilding.
Now that we’ve seen most of an offseason with the new rules in place, there are a few conclusions we can draw about where the Blazers stand, and how the realities of the new CBA could impact them—and the rest of the league—going forward.