Veteran guard Seth Curry spent training camp as a member of the Golden State Warriors, playing alongside his brother (Stephen; you may have heard of him) in practices and scrimmages (though not any preseason games).
Right before the regular season began, general manager Mike Dunleavy Jr. waived the younger Curry, but it came with a pretty clear understanding among fans and media alike that the separation was temporary.
Why does such a strange dynamic exist and persist? Curry and the Warriors are dealing with the ramifications of elements introduced in the 2023 collective bargaining agreement: hard caps.
The NBA implemented a salary cap 41 years ago for the 1984-85 season, but it spent four decades as a soft cap rather than a hard cap like the NFL, where teams cannot cross the payroll threshold for any reason for any amount of time.
Instead, the NBA’s system is more fluid, allowing teams to exceed the cap to re-sign their own free agents via Bird rights, as well as through various other tools like the midlevel and biannual exceptions for free agents and trade exceptions to facilitate transactions.
Presumably inspired by talented and expensive teams such as the Warriors, at least some owners originally pushed for a hard cap when negotiating the current CBA. That was a non-starter for the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA), but the two sides eventually created a system that ostensibly maintained the soft-cap structure but added triggers that could hard cap teams at specific points higher than the base salary cap while also narrowing the team-building tools more expensive franchises could use to improve their roster.
In effect, the new CBA creates four tiers of teams, distinguished by the tools their executives have available to improve the roster. (Please note this is a simplified version, as there are hard-cap triggers beyond the ones listed below):
- Cap space teams: Whatever cap space they have below the $154.6 million line this season, plus a room exception, which starts at $8.8 million this season
- Over the cap, below the first apron ($195.9 million this season): Non-taxpayer midlevel exception (starting at $14.1 million this season) and the biannual exception (starting at $5.1 million this season)
- Between the first and second apron ($207.8 million this season): No access to the non-taxpayer MLE or biannual but access to the smaller taxpayer MLE (starting at $5.7 million)
- Over the second apron: Can retain their own players using Bird rights but can only sign new additions to minimum contracts
Once they had that framework, the parties had concerns that limiting the tools and exceptions expensive teams could use potentially opened a loophole where those front offices could use something meant for less expensive teams and then push their spending over the original line, allowing them to have their cake and eat it too.
That inspired a structure in which using something prohibited at a higher level of spending triggered a hard cap at the level of spending where that resource is unavailable. For example, signing a player with the non-taxpayer MLE hard caps a franchise at the first apron because teams over that line cannot use it.
That idea makes sense, but in practice, it has run into two major problems. The first: Under the current system, too many different things front offices do trigger each of the hard caps, so those hard caps are in place a lot more often than is ideal.
While we simplified it for the explanation above, another trigger is that taking on more money in a trade hard-caps teams at the first apron unless they make the trade using cap space, which very few teams have in any given offseason now.
As such, almost every trade subjects one of the teams involved to a hard cap for the rest of that season. This was a big challenge the Knicks and Nets had to navigate in the Mikal Bridges deal in 2024.
Instead of these restrictions being a real inconvenience for a few front offices each year, they are a consideration in almost all negotiations and often a very real hurdle that requires involving a third team to facilitate or resorting to other, more complicated structures.
The second problem is fascinating as well. Remember that hard caps prevent teams from going over that line for any reason for any amount of time. Most situations are pretty straightforward, but we have already seen some truly impressive edge cases that demonstrate the limitations of a hard cap within the NBA.
One way to understand this issue is unlikely bonuses, which have long been a way for teams to reward players for superlative performance — and also help agents “win the press conference” with reported contract values that are higher than what the player will actually get paid.
The single best example of how hard caps create worse outcomes is last season’s Dallas Mavericks. In the 2024 offseason, general manager Nico Harrison brought in Klay Thompson via sign-and-trade, which hard-capped his team at the first apron.
Seven months later, he stunned the basketball world by trading Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers, a move that, along with his other deadline deals, left the Mavericks perilously close to the first-apron hard cap. After that, the team suffered a brutal series of injuries that led to, at one point, completing a March game with only seven healthy players. The Mavericks were eligible for hardship exemptions because of those injuries, but using one would have put them over the hard cap, so the CBA prevented them from adding reinforcements. It is fair to criticize Harrison for poor execution (on this and many, many other elements of his now-former job), but the core challenge is still real.
Seth Curry (30) swapped jerseys with his brother Steph (31) during a Warriors preseason open practice, but the younger Curry has remained in a holding pattern since. (Noah Graham / NBAE via Getty Images)
That all brings us back to Seth Curry.
The Warriors signed Al Horford using the taxpayer MLE, which hard-capped them at the second apron for the 2025-26 season. After coming to terms with Jonathan Kuminga following a protracted negotiation, the team did not have enough breathing room under the hard cap after Kuminga and their other transactions to sign Seth Curry to a minimum contract for the full season. Since minimum contracts prorate over the season as teams play games, they needed to wait until at least Nov. 11 to legally sign him — but have waited longer to avoid what the Mavericks went through a season ago, as each day gives them more breathing room they may eventually need to use.
While the Warriors are the most dramatic current example, another five teams are within $5 million of an already-triggered hard cap, including the Houston Rockets, who do not have the wiggle room to use a disabled player exception after Fred VanVleet tore his ACL in the preseason (or even just sign someone for the minimum), and the Mavericks, who are again uncomfortably close to a hard cap, this time $1.2 million below the second apron. They are joined by the LA Clippers (first apron), Orlando Magic (first apron) and New York Knicks (second apron).
There are ways the owners and players can clean up the most unnecessarily painful parts of the current CBA in future agreements, but hard caps will be thorny to navigate with the NBA system for as long as they exist.
