 After a disappointing season where the team traded away Damian Lillard's longtime running mate in CJ McCollum and tanked hard down the stretch, the Portland Trail Blazers are entering a pivotal offseason that may be their last real chance to re-tool around Lillard. There are two pretty distinct pathways that the Blazers can take this summer, and that is operating as a cap space team or as an over-the-cap team. There are pros and cons to each approach, and we will flesh out each pathway fully below.
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 With the NBA draft lottery over and the draft order set, we can now take a look at the cap space landscape around the league heading into the draft. This is not an offseason flush with cash. I project only six teams with the ability to generate meaningful cap space this offseason, with the other 24 limited only to using various exceptions to sign free agents. Down below you will see a breakout of the teams that fall into or between the main cap space categories: Cap Space teams, Teams with the ability to use the Non-Tax Payer Mid-Level, and teams limited to the Tax Payer Mid-Level.
Here is a look at the possible exceptions available to teams this summer: Non-Taxpayer Mid-Level Exception (NTMLE): $10,349,000 Taxpayer Mid-Level Exception (TMLE): $6,392,000 Room Mid-Level Exception (RMLE): $5,329,000 Bi-Annual Exception (BAE): $4,050,000  Another slow week for moves around the NBA, so this week I wanted to take a look at the period of time where transactions are the most active. Free agency. The 2022 free agency to be exact. I will be taking a look at the cap space landscape for next summer as it currently stands, as well as the positional marketplaces and who some of the marquee free agents will be. Now, we still have a long 2021-2022 season to go before we get there, a season that will be full of trades, buy-outs and more that could shift the landscape of the offseason tremendously. But for now, here is how the league stands for next summer.
 It's been a pretty slow transaction week in the NBA. With the deadline for rookie extensions coming up next month, I wanted to take a look at some of the more intriguing rookie extension negotiations that will be taking place for this week's Cap Talk. Let's dive into possible extensions for my three most intriguing extensions candidates: Collin Sexton, Jaren Jackson Jr, and Mikal Bridges.
 This is a new weekly post I’ve been meaning to do called Cap Talk. It’s going to a bit of a deep dive into the minutiae of the transactions, (legitimate) rumors, and whatever has caught my eye from the past week. It’ll be posted regularly every Tuesday based on the week prior. We start out with a week filled with transactions and drama. Lets get to it.
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