NBA Free Agency 2015: Utah Jazz updated Salary Cap information

The Utah Jazz didn't make a big splash with NBA Free Agency this off-season; true, they didn't land any of the big name stars. But that is to be expected right now. Our team is still developing and aren't quite there yet to go "all in" on winning. Dennis Lindsey, the Jazz GM, is both smart and cautious. He's not in a rush to hamstring internal improvement for the sake of being an 8th seed with the potential to only one day be a 6th seed. And while I argue that none of the big free agents took their talents to Salt Lake, it is important to recognize all of the smaller moves Lindsey has made. This is a roster constructed to a) get better by itself, b) be financially capable of extending rookie scale contracts to near Max levels, and most importantly, c) seemingly get a return on the investment put into some of the assets Lindsey as collected. This is a team that's going to win games, and improve on that season by season. And as of right now, this is a team that is still $13 million under the 2015-2016 Salary Cap.

Click on that to make it bigger.

• So the updated information here is mainly about Raul Neto, duh. Yahoo! Sport's Adrian Wojnarowski dropped the estimated value of his contract and its' length. After being interviewed after tonight's game Raul indicated that he believes his first two years are guaranteed. I'm guessing that the third year is non-guaranteed like a lot of second round contracts -- peep Grant Jerrett's. Of course, the last year could be a team option, or even the first two years about be something else. I don't know how confident Neto was in this answer; nor do I know how much he is allowed to talk about his contract. I am estimating that it'll be a similar weight to Bryce Cotton's contract which appears to be -15%, +0%, +15% over the last few seasons. And that's why I have indicated there is a skew. All of that is conjecture. I freely admit that.
• Trey Lyles' contract is simply 120% of his Cap Hold, which I got from Basketball Insiders. They did not include the progression over the next few seasons, but I extrapolated that from the normative average growth season-by-season for #12 picks from the last few seasons. A good template for this was Steven Adams.
• Lastly, the data for the Salary Cap, Cap Minimum, and Luxury Tax for the 2018-2019 season is not from any site. It's an estimation of the Cap growth. Of course, before we go from 2017-2018 to 2018-2019 we're going to hit another Lockout. So the values for 2018-2019 are effectively a) completely made up, and b) going to be invalid going forward. I just needed to represent the expected cap space for the Jazz, as they only really have Alec Burks under contract that far down the road.
• {Peter Falk voice} One more thing . . . we're led to believe that Tibor Pleiss is going to sign with the Jazz. He's been working out with them quite consistently over the last week+, and the Jazz have reportedly paid the transfer fee to FC Barca Basket. You don't pay that fee and get all of that paperwork done until you're ready to sign that guy. So all of this info is going to change once again, probably within the next 36 hours. Hooray!

As it currently stands the Jazz are $13.212 million under the Salary Cap. They do not need to reach the cap, and as astutely pointed out in a previous comments section, they do not even NEED to reach the 90% minimum salary value either. They can just pro-rate the existing contracts up to whatever they need to, in order to reach 90%. If that is the case the Jazz, after signing Tibor, will have 13 contracts on the books. You need to meet both the financial minimum (of which the Jazz currently do not), and the roster size minimum. That minimum is 13 players, and would be satisfied if the Jazz get Tibor.

There are four non-guaranteed contracts (Bryce Cotton, Elijah Millsap, Chris Johnson, and Jack Cooley) that the Jazz still have to deal with. If the team is going to the maximum roster size, 15 players, then only two of them can join the team. They all have identical contracts, so that doesn't change anything. Furthermore, there's second round draft pick Olivier Hanlan to contest with. Though, not many 2nd round draft picks routinely make the Jazz of late. (One could ask Goran Suton all about that.) We'll see what happens.

At the moment the Jazz roster looks like this:

1. Point Guard: Dante Exum, Trey Burke, Raul Neto
2. Shooting Guard: Alec Burks, Joe Ingles
3. Small Forward: Gordon Hayward, Rodney Hood
4. Power Forward: Derrick Favors, Trevor Booker, Trey Lyles, Grant Jerrett
5. Center: Rudy Gobert, (Tibor Pleiß)

There will be more detailed analysis of this as a) we get more details, b) more moves are made, and c) I get a chance to sleep. I'm going to bed now (TMI?), but I wanted to get this image out there to help educate and inform Utah Jazz fans!