NBA Announces 2016-17 Salary Cap, Luxury Tax and Salary Floor
The NBA formally announced the salary cap and salary floor for the 2016-17 season on Saturday.
The salary cap comes in at $94.1 million, and teams will hit the luxury tax at $113.3 million, per The Vertical's Chris Mannix. The minimum a team must spend to avoid incurring a penalty will be $84.7 million.
The numbers are a little higher than expected. On April 15, USA Today's Jeff Zillgitt reported the league sent a memo to NBA executives that projected a $92 million salary cap and $111 million luxury tax. Either way, general managers knew they'd have a lot of money to spend this summer.
In February 2015, the NBA players union rejected a gradual smoothing of the salary cap once the league's roughly $24 billion television deal with ESPN and Turner Sports went into effect. As a result, the cap grew by a little over $24 million from 2015-16 to 2016-17, per RealGM.
| 2012-13 | $58,044,000 | $70,307,000 |
| 2013-14 | $58,679,000 | $71,748,000 |
| 2014-15 | $63,065,000 | $76,829,000 |
| 2015-16 | $70,000,000 | $84,740,000 |
| 2016-17 | $94,100,000 | $113,300,000 |
The salary cap is set to see another major jump before leveling off a bit more over future seasons. According to Zillgitt, $107 million is the early expectation for the 2017-18 cap, and the figure will rise to $112 million for the 2020-21 season.
