Trae Young, salary dump?
Once traded for Luka, now a cellar-dwelling Wizard
The free agent market went so frigid last summer that Gary Trent Jr. signed with the Milwaukee Bucks for $3.7 million. He’s a solid NBA player who earlier had, reportedly, turned down a 2024 offer worth $15 million a year because it wasn’t enough. In the interim, he didn’t change much, but his problem became that whereas most years five or ten teams might have bid for his services, in 2025, pretty much all the teams with meaningful cap space were named the Brooklyn Nets.
Since then, you’ve probably heard a lot of talk about this being the “apron era,” as if the rules governing the highest-spending teams only just appeared. But the basic structure of the current CBA comes from 2011, with the wrinkle of the second apron arriving in 2023. Another way of seeing what happened is that the CBA…
