Building over the cap

Most NBA teams operate over the salary cap most of the time. The CBA lets them keep functioning through exceptions: Bird rights to re-sign their own free agents, a mid-level exception sized by their spending tier, a bi-annual exception, and minimum-salary contracts that are always available.

Which tools a team gets depends on where its payroll sits relative to the tax and the two aprons: the deeper into the penalty tiers, the fewer and smaller the tools.