HOOPSWORLD | Basketball News & NBA Rumors

With the 2011 NBA Lockout underway who knows when free agency may actually begin. Actually, who knows what rules teams will be working under when it does begin, what the salary cap may be, what players they need to replace, what happens to their own free agents…

Really, we don’t know a lot. What we can tell you is, as of today, how much money each team has committed to the 2011-12 season.

We did this back in May (check that out for comparison to now), but since then trades have been made around the draft, options have been exercised and declined, and – well – all possible movement has come to a halt.

Here’s the table as of right now, based on the salaries in the HOOPSWORLD salary pages and the latest transaction data. The first column is the amount currently on the books, the second is how much over or under the 2010-11 salary cap number of $57.044 million and the luxury tax level of $70.307 million the team sits (GREEN = under, BLACK = over cap but under luxury tax, and RED = over luxury tax). Players drafted at the 2011 NBA Draft – including all 30 first-round picks – are not included in those totals because they could not sign contracts before the CBA expired and the lockout began. It also does not take into account minimum salaries to fill out a minimum 13-man roster (for example, the New Orleans figure only encompasses six players; the Oklahoma City number counts 14). Check each team’s salary page for more details on what makes up the total number.

As you can see, there have been some major changes. Thanks to Nene and David West exercising their Early Termination Options, Denver has now become the team with the most cap space (relative to the 2010-11 cap) and New Orleans went from about $5 million under the cap to $13.6 million under. Both teams claim to want to keep their stars, and both stars claim to want to return, but as of right now they have a boatload of space.

Minnesota saw a large decrease in its available cap space – $4.8 million – largely because of the signing of Ricky Rubio. Oklahoma City cut their available space almost in half with the one-year extension they gave Nazr Mohammed.

However, each team stayed in the same group. The ones under the cap figure are still under, the ones over are still over, and the ones who would be tax payers are still tax payers (though Portland, San Antonio and the L.A. Lakers all have reduced the amount they would be in the red). On paper, there looks to be a lot of cap space to go around.

Well, maybe.

{AUTHOR_BOX}It seems very likely the next time free agency begins a hard cap will be in place, and it will undoubtedly be lower than the current luxury tax level. The highest figure discussed has been $65 million, which means seven (the previous for over the luxury tax level, plus Miami, Phoenix and Atlanta) teams would need the benefit of an amnesty clause and/or salary rollbacks to be in compliance, unless there was some kind of superstar provision which removed one player from the total cap figure (something else that has been discussed.

The next figure thrown out has been $62 million; add Boston and Chicago to the list of teams affected directly.

As that hard cap figure goes down – and reportedly the Owners’ side has promised the figure will go down the longer the lockout lasts – more and more teams will be affected, and the teams at the high end of the scale (Lakers) will be affected more drastically.

Salary rollbacks and superstar exceptions – or a combination of both – must be in place for any kind of a hard cap to be feasible from the outside. Even in the gradually reduced cap proposal from a couple weeks ago this would be needed. No proposal that forces a team to have to part ways with a key member of the franchise just because of the new rules – when that team was built following all allowable practices under the old rules – is fair.

Will that be what happens? At this point there really is no answer for that. Until the Players and Owners sit down and have meaningful conversations with meaningful progress, it’s all just speculation as to how the league proceeds from here.

What’s not speculation is these numbers. As of now, these are the commitments. We’ll just see if it stays that way.

Leave your thoughts in the comments below! Follow Jason Fleming on Twitter.