The CBA Glossary

Salary matching

Broadly put, teams over the NBA salary cap have to indulge in the practice of "salary-matching" if they are going to trade players.

Successive NBA Collective Bargaining Agreements have liberalised the parameters of such to the point that "matching" does not require a one-to-one equilibrium. Indeed, the tolerances are getting wider - unless your team is suitably far over the cap to be burdened by the aprons. Then, it gets tighter again.

(* For teams over the cap to be able to make trades requires a salary cap exception. This exception, confusingly, is named the Traded Player Exception in the CBA. It is not however the same thing as what is commonly called a Traded Player Exception in NBA parlance, the vehicle that allows for time-delayed trades. However, the usage of the term TPE to refer to the latter of these is almost exclusive, and is mirrored here.)

The "Stepien Rule"

Draft picks are key trade assets, moreso than the rights of players they ultimately turn into.

In this regard, there has been a new trend developing in NBA roster construction over the last few years in which, in a bid to bypass what is known colloquially as the Ted Stepien Rule, teams trading for star players offer multiple future first-round draft picks in eligible seasons, and offer unconditional pick swaps in the gap years.

The Stepien rules states that NBA teams are prohibited from leaving themselves without first-round draft picks in future consecutive years, and is named for the former owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, Ted Stepien, whose short chaotic tenure involved mortgaging the future for the immediate. This proved especially costly when a February 1980 trade of injured reserve forward Butch Lee for uninjured reserve forward Don Ford saw a 1982 first-round pick attached, one which later became James Worthy. The rule, then, essentially exists to protect Stepien-esque owners from themselves.

The Stepien rule applies only to future first-round picks; in its simplest form, then, a team could hypothetically trade away its 2028 and 2030 first-rounders today, irrespective of whether or not they kept their 2027 pick. What they could not do today, though, would be trade away its 2027, 2028 and 2029 first-rounders. Teams therefore have begun to work around this rule by trading away the right to swap picks in the years in between the conveyed picks, and doing so at the highest possible scale.

Swap rights

Trading swap rights is not a particularly recent invention, but what has become more commonplace is trades for stars incorporating both multiple first-round picks and first-round pick swaps conveyed, so as to leverage maximum draft capital. Where only recently it was an unprecedented yield, it is now "the package", the assumed and/or demanded return for a star or superstar player, and one used with increasing regularity.

Trade kickers

No-trade clauses

As a starting point, the CBA demands that NBA contracts cannot restrict a team's ability to trade a player. It does however create a couple of exceptions. ⓘ Article XXIV: (Prohibiton of No-Trade Contracts), Section 1. (General Limitation):

No Player Contract may contain any prohibition or limitation of an NBA Team's right to assign such Contract to another NBA Team.

A no-trade clause is exactly what it sounds like. It gives players the right to refuse - or the requirement to approve, if you would prefer - any trade in which they are set to be included. ⓘ

In practice, though, they are extremely rare. Currently, there are only two, belonging to LeBron James and Damian Lillard. And there have never been more than a smattering at any snapshot in time since 1980.

In large part, this is due to the particulars of the circumstances that must come about before a player can be offered one. To be eligible for a no-trade clause in a new contract, a player must have eight years of NBA experience, and have spent at least part of at least four of those seasons with the team he is signing the new contract with. These are the minimum parameters for no-trade clause eligibility, and they must be true at the time of the signing of the respective contract. If a player happens to pass those thresholds while still on an incumbent deal, they cannot shove one in retroactively. ⓘ Article XXIV: (Prohibiton of No-Trade Contracts), Section 2. (Exceptions to General Limitation):

(b) A Player Contract entered into by a player who has eight (8) or more Years of Service in the NBA and who has rendered four (4) or more Years of Service for the Team entering into such Contract may contain a prohibition or limitation of such Team's right to trade such Contract to another NBA Team.

For what it's worth, those 8/4 parameters do not have to have been the most recent 8/4 seasons. If the Lakers were to sign Shaquille O'Neal tomorrow, for example, they could insert a no-trade clause. However, since this is a time of liberalisation, growth in player power and far greater roster turnover than ever before, these circumstances are becoming ever rarer to find. Players change teams far more often, and although careers are lasting longer due to the enhanced understanding of load management and medical science, the players outside of the tops of rotations get turned over more regularly, resulting in only a fraction of the total of NBA players getting to the eight-year criterion. Let alone the four.

Moreover, there is not usually much incentive for teams to offer such an instrument. After all, no-trade clauses do not help them. It takes Bradley Beal-esque circumstances - All-Star calibre player, second maximum contract, the kind of talent that every other team would take in a playing style that should age gracefully, and his incumbent team being a lottery regular needing to offer every incentive they could to stay ahead - to ever see one given out. They are rare for several reasons. And in light of how badly Bradley's worked out, they may now only get rarer.

If the player is traded by the team he signed the contract with the no-trade clause with, the clause goes with him. Additionally, no-trade clauses are not like trade bonuses (also known as trade kickers). They are inexhaustible over the life of the contract, and unlike a bonus, can be applied multiple times. That is to say, waiving the right to veto the trade once does not mean it is waived thereafter.

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In addition to the no-trade clayse, there also exist other circumstances in which a player cannot be traded, regardless of their individual consent.

The other instances in which a player cannot be traded come about not from player vetoes, but from rules affecting everybody. The most common such rule is the one which states that players who sign as a free agent (including sign-and-trades) cannot be traded for at least three months, or until December 15th, whichever is later. This prohibition covered almost everyone who signed as a free agent this summer, and while that December date has now passed, it affected several dozen players, a sizeable chunk of the potential trade market. It also still affects some other signings; Stanley Johnson, Kemba Walker, Bruno Fernando, Blake Griffin, Anthony Lamb and Ty Jerome will all need to wait for their own three-month clocks to expire before they can be dealt. Article XXIV: (Prohibiton of No-Trade Contracts), Section 1. (General Limitation):

Testes.

In addition to that, players re-signed who received more than a 120% raise in the first year of their new contract over the last year of their previous one are not tradeable until January 15th, if they re-signed using Early or Full Bird rights and the team re-signing them is over cap. Players re-signed using a different exception do not qualify, nor do players re-signed to more than a 120% raise using Early or Full Bird rights as part of a sign-and-trade.

Two-way contract players almost never get traded, for self-evident reasons (they are fringe NBA players, after all), yet a further provision prevents them from being traded within the first 30 days of signing.

Some players who signed extensions have in the process also taken themselves off the trade market. On account of signing Designated Veteran extensions (known as "supermax" deals colloquially), Devin Booker, Karl-Anthony Towns and Nikola Jokic cannot be traded until next July, and on account of signing non-supermax extensions that are nevertheless bigger than what would have been permissible in extend-and-trade transactions, each of LeBron James, Maxi Kleber, C.J. McCollum, Larry Nance Jr, Dean Wade and Andrew Wiggins have also made themselves untradeable until six months have passed since its signing.

Finally, any player acquired after July 1st in a trade cannot be traded back to the team who traded him until the following July 1st. This, then, prevents the following players from returning to the following teams.

the prevention of trading players within their first 30 days of signing as a draft pick, or the provision that players received in trade by teams over the cap cannot be traded again for two months unless they are being traded alone) or which had no one to whom it applied (such as the need to wait two months before trading a player acquired off of waivers). The full list can be found here.

If some of those names seem relatively trivial, that is because they are. But trivial can be enough. Back in February 2008, the Dallas Mavericks had to make two attempts at trading for Jason Kidd, as Devean George was included in the first one, and he did not want to be. Only ever a throw-in to the trade that brought Jason Kidd to the Mavericks, Devean George decided he didn't want to leave Dallas and exercised his right to veto the deal, much to the annoyance of the relevant fanbases. It was a legitimate veto power, and was also kind of funny.

Nonetheless, even with those added examples, trade vetoes remain very rare. Many of those players hold no trade value, even as purely financial instruments, and even when such occasions can arise - such as was seen last season, when Solomon Hill, then injured, could have vetoed the salary dump trade he was included in - it is almost never invoked.players acquired by trade cannot be re-traded for two months if they are done so in combination with other outgoing players and the team trading them is over the capWith one exception: the date becomes Jan. 15 if the player is a Larry Bird or Early Bird free agent who re-signed with his over-the-cap team and received a raise greater than 20% in the first season of his new deal in the process.

Trading coaches

Yes, it's possible.

HOW STEVE NOVAK CHANGED THINGS

“Traded Player” means a player whose Player Contract is
assigned by one Team to another Team other than by means of the NBA
waiver procedure.

MAIN TAKEAWAYS: