NBA salary cap jumps to $70M for 2015-16
With the NBA's moratorium on signings lifted at 12:01 a.m. Thursday, the financials are in. The NBA salary cap will rise to $70 million next season, the league announced on Wednesday night.
The team tax level for next season increases 10.3 percent to $84.7 million. That figure was $76.8 million for the 2014-15 season. The cap itself was $63.1 this past season.
Last week, news broke that the cap number would come in about $2 million higher than expected. Teams had projected a cap of around $67 million.
With the number bigger than projected, it will mean slightly bigger max deals for free agents starting Thursday - DeAndre Jordan, if he chooses to stay with the Los Angeles Clippers, for one.
Here's a quick rundown of the numbers from Bleacher Report's Howard Beck. The tax line is where the luxury tax kicks in, the MLE is the mid-level exception, and so forth.
More numbers from NBA memo:
Tax line: $84.74 mil
MLE: $5.464 mil
Taxpayer ML: $3.376 mil
Room ML: $2.814 mil
— Howard Beck (@HowardBeck) July 9, 2015
Conservative projections for next year have the cap skyrocketing to $89 million per team, once the league's new TV deal kicks in.