Cleveland Cavaliers GM Danny Ferry is going to have his hands full in the summer of 2010. We try to figure out exactly how much money Ferry will have to spend on free agents in the “Summer of Truth” for the Cavaliers.

When the Akron Beacon Journal’s Patrick McManamon recently wrote about the possibility of the Cavs signing two megastars in the summer of 2010, it lit up the blogosphere. And with good reason. With still over a month until preseason games begin, and with little going on in free agency or trades at this point, it left us all with precious little to write about. So it’s only natural that such a speculative piece would be so widely covered.

With that in mind, I began to think about Patrick’s article. I wondered how realistic it really was. The one thing Patrick neglected to mention in his piece was the NBA’s “Free Agent Amount” cap charge. The basis of this rule is that a team’s free agents continue to count against the cap until either the team renounces their rights to the player, the player signs with the same team, or the player signs with another team. In other words, even though he’s a free agent in 2010, LeBron James will still count towards the Cavalier’s team salary and thus will freeze up some of that cap space Patrick was talking about.

Even considering LeBron’s Free Agent Amount, it would still appear the Cavaliers would have a lot of money to spend, but exactly how much? That’s what I wanted to look into, and so I decided to do a little research for all of us to come up with maybe a more realistic idea of what the Cavalier’s free agent situation will look like in that monumental summer of 2010.    [Read more...]