Salary Cap 101: What are exceptions, and why do they matter?

The NBA salary cap is a complicated system, with rules and multiple situations where the rules don’t apply. In that sense, it’s a lot like the English language – it’s ‘I’ before ‘E’ except after ‘C’ or when sounding like ‘a’ as in neighbor and weigh, and on weekends and holidays and…sorry, Brian Reagan took over the keyboard.

Yet reading and understanding the NBA’s salary cap rules is something like that. We introduced the basics of the salary cap last week, and this week we will dig into one specific aspect of the cap: exceptions.

What are salary cap exceptions?

In general, an NBA team cannot sign a player or make a trade for a player that would take that team over the salary cap. However,…