The notion was tantalizing for Los Angeles Lakers fans.
On June 30, the day before the start of this summer's NBA free agency, Yahoo! Sports reported the Lakers were exploring trades to clear enough cap space to sign both LaMarcus Aldridge and DeAndre Jordan as free agents.
As it turned out, both Aldridge and Jordan passed on the Lakers. But it's still worth considering how a team that added two of the top free agents on the market while stripping its roster of nearly all other assets might play.
Answering that question helps reveal why free agency is better for completing a team than building one in the first place.
The tabula rasa team
To get far enough under the salary cap to offer both Aldridge and Jordan the maximum salary, the Lakers would have had to clean house.
To reduce the incentive for this kind of scenario, the NBA's collective bargaining agreement charges teams with a cap hold for the league's minimum salary ($525,093 this season) for each open spot on the roster, up to 12 players. Because of those holds and Kobe Bryant's salary, the Lakers would have had to trade everyone under contract for more than the minimum, including No. 2 overall pick D'Angelo Russell and 2014 first-round pick Julius Randle. Besides Bryant, the only other returning player L.A. could have afforded to keep was second-year guard Jordan Clarkson, who is set to make less than a million dollars next season.
Let's say the Lakers had pulled it off and put together a 2015-16 roster of Aldridge, Bryant, Clarkson, Jordan and 11 players making the minimum salary. Here's how a multiyear version of ESPN's real plus-minus (RPM), adjusted for age, would have projected that lineup:
Because of all the minutes for replacement-level players making the minimum -- projected based on Daniel Myers' research on replacement performance -- despite the presence of Aldridge and Jordan, RPM would project this free agent-based version of the Lakers with an offense just slightly better than league average. Because Bryant and Clarkson score so poorly defensively, they would be projected as 2.7 points per 100 possessions worse than average on D -- similar to the past season's Denver Nuggets.
The bottom line: a projected 37 wins, which would have been good for 12th in the Western Conference a season ago.
In reality, a Lakers team with Aldridge and Jordan probably could have done better. First, for convenience I ignored the $2.8 million room exception the Lakers would have had available. Second, the promise of copious playing time and the chance to live in L.A. would surely have drawn some minimum-salary free agents better than replacement level. Still, it's hard to imagine the Lakers could have gotten much better than a .500 team by cleaning house to sign two max free agents, and that's instructive.
The two ways NBA teams win
Nobody has explained NBA finances better than Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, who observed that teams can succeed in two ways: by paying their players more money than other teams or using the money they spend more efficiently.
It's possible for a team using cap space to outspend its opponents. That requires either creative cap management, as in the case of the past season's Cleveland Cavaliers making history by starting the season under the cap (so as to sign LeBron James) and finishing it as taxpayers, or low cap holds for players the team can re-sign using Bird rights. The San Antonio Spurs took advantage of the latter inefficiency this summer to sign Aldridge, then exceed the cap by paying Danny Green and Kawhi Leonard a combined $11.6 million more than the pair counted against it.
The blank-slate Lakers would not have been able to exceed the cap substantially, only as much as possible using the room exception and minimum-salary contracts. Nor would they have spent their money particularly efficiently. While star free agents such as Aldridge and Jordan can be value contracts because they are worth more than the maximum salary -- particularly if teams can lock them in before the cap increases -- the best values are generally productive players on their first NBA contracts, and the Lakers would have been forced to trade all their young players, save Clarkson.
This is an extreme example, of course, in part because the Lakers are paying Bryant $25 million without getting commensurate on-court value. But the Dallas Mavericks were looking at a relatively similar scenario, had Jordan followed through on his commitment to sign with the team.
The Mavericks might have had only one player -- 2015 first-round pick Justin Anderson -- on a rookie contract. All their starters would have been signed via free agency. Dallas was in better shape than the Lakers because Dirk Nowitzki signed for less than his market value the past summer, which gave the team more cap space to sign other players. Still, adding Jordan and Wesley Matthews via free agency would have taken up all the Mavericks' cap space and limited their options for filling out the bench. It probably would have taken Dallas another season or two to build depth around the core of free agents.
These examples -- Dallas and L.A. -- will remain relevant as the cap rises and more teams use space instead of staying over the cap and using exceptions to add talent. In particular, the Lakers will have a chance to offer a pair of max contracts next summer if Bryant elects to retire and his massive salary is cleared from the team's books. In that case, the Lakers will be in better shape because they would be able to retain their recent lottery picks (Randle and Russell) and Clarkson would have a tiny cap hold as a restricted free agent. They would no longer be starting from scratch.
Still, the lesson here is the NBA's finances make free agency better for adding the finishing touches to a team than starting to build one. While the cap goes up, rookie contracts and cap holds -- set by the CBA independent of the size of the cap -- won't keep pace, which gives teams with young talent in place a big edge in putting together rosters that can win immediately.