NBA Free Agency 2014: Carrick Felix and all the Utah Jazz Salary, Agents, and Draft Pick changes

So this afternoon Utah Jazz General Manager Dennis Lindsey made another trade -- the second of this off-season after the NBA Draft. The first was a move to say goodbye to Non-Guaranteed contract Diante Garrett and gain a draft pick and Steve Novak. This time around he said goodbye to non-guaranted contracts in John Lucas III, Malcolm Thomas, and Erik Murphy for a draft pick and Carrick Felix. As a result, the Jazz made decisions on three of the four players on non-guaranteed contracts (they become guaranteed on August 1st). And in addition to matching the contract for Gordon Hayward, signing unrestricted free agent Trevor Booker, and signing draft picks Dante Exum and Rodney Hood the Jazz now have 12 players under contract.

The Carrick trade announcement can be found here, and the details include the Jazz getting $1 million dollars, and a 2015 2nd round pick. That's great news. So what you are probably wondering is:

• What's the Jazz cap situation like now?
• How many players do they need to sign in order to reach the NBA minimum?
• How much money do the have left to spend?
• And what's the deal with all of the draft picks?

Okay, first thing first. The cap -- the cap is set for $63,065,000, and the Jazz need to reach 90% of that at least, which would be $56,758,500. Right now with the latest trade the Jazz now have $56,074,531 on the books spread out over 12 players. So the Jazz need to sign one more guy. And spend a little bit more (less than $1 million) to reach the minimums.

John Lucas III, Malcolm Thomas, and Erik Murphy are all gone. The only non-guaranteed contact left is Ian Clark. If the Jazz do pay him what he's scheduled to pay then they will a) meet the minimum roster size requirement, and b) be between the minimum roster value requirement and the actual salary cap. We do see that the Jazz are pretty in contact with Mark Bartelstein and Andy Miller. If you think we're going to fill our roster with one more of their players, I can do a list of the ones who are currently available.

But if we are going away from Clark, and there is a rumor that we're interested in Toure' Murry , then we must know that the Jazz can spend $0.684 to $6.990 million left. So there is money to spend, if they want.

So what about the draft picks? Well, we did get a confirmation on the year for the Steve Novak trade pick (2017), and we also got a confirmation on the pick from the Jarnell Stokes trade from NBA Draft night. All in all, the Jazz have a lot of picks.

Yeah, let's hope that we are able to move these more into players for the team, and less into more future Stokes style trades. After a while, there's a limit to how many future picks can actually help a team win games.

So now that the team is mostly set what do we think? I am excited to see a starting lineup of Trey Burke, Alec Burks, Gordon Hayward, Enes Kanter, and Derrick Favors. And I feel like fans will fall in love with a bench of Dante Exum, Rodney Hood, Jeremy Evans, Trevor Booker, and Rudy Gobert. Hopefully Ian Clark is also back, and he will get spot minutes along with Steve Novak, and Carrick Felix. There are many five man line-ups that are going to be awesome to cheer for and watch.