After a summer that saw the San Antonio Spurs finally have some salary cap space to play with, many fans may be wondering where the Spurs stand now after re-signing the players they still wanted and picking up a couple new pieces.
Tiago Splitter and Manu Ginobili were both quickly signed again by the Spurs front office shortly after the start of free agency. That required the front office to pony up some significant money to retain the services of the Brazilian big man and the tricky Argentine guard.
Splitter signed a four-year, $36 million deal, while Manu put pen to paper on a two-year, $14.5 million deal. As you can imagine, these two signings made the vast majority of the Spurs cap space disappear.
The Spurs front office quickly decided that Gary Neal and DeJuan Blair were expendable, so they snapped up Marco Belinelli in short order to replace Neal, and not long after, signed Jeff Ayres to take Blair’s spot on the roster. These two were reportedly signed with the Spurs’ MLE. Belinelli signed for two years at $5.6 million, and Ayres two years at around $3.5 million . That left about $650,000 of the MLE unused thus far.
At this point, the Spurs are sitting above the salary cap of $58,679,000, at $63,666,028. With the luxury tax set at $ 71,748,000, at least the Spurs are once again a non-tax payer.
So, what does all this mean going forward? Essentially the Spurs, being over the cap, are now pretty much relegated to offering only minimum contracts to any free agents they may want to add throughout the season.
