Cavaliers' reward for moderate success is a series of difficult offseason choices

New York Times

14-05-2025

It took a long time for Ty Jerome and De'Andre Hunter to get here. Teammates at the University of Virginia for two years who won a national championship together in 2019, the two became best friends who stayed in constant touch through the ups and downs of their first five pro seasons.
Then, out of the blue, both erupted with career years in 2024-25. At midseason, Hunter was traded to Cleveland, and he and Jerome were reunited — on a team called the Cavaliers, no less — their lockers often paired next to each other on road trips. Cleveland won its first 12 games with the two in the lineup, briefly taking the two to a staggering 46-3 record lifetime when they played together before some late-season losses took some shine off the percentage.
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Now it might be over, chemistry and friendship be damned.
Cleveland's five-game defeat to the Indiana Pacers puts the Cavs' future with this suddenly expensive roster in question. Jerome is a free agent the team might not be able to afford, and Hunter is a $24 million sixth man who similarly might not have a place in the team's salary structure going forward. Those are but two of the myriad questions facing the Cavs entering the summer.
The real issue here isn't Cleveland's playoff setback, however, but the collective bargaining agreement and the second-apron payroll threshold. If there's one thing everyone expected from the new CBA in 2023, it's that it would force successful teams to make hard choices under increasingly oppressive salary-cap circumstances.
On that front, it's perhaps been a little too successful. A cap-rules regime originally intended as a flex on the spendthrift owners of the LA Clippers and Golden State Warriors instead seems set to inflict its wrath on almost any team that dares to succeed at a high level. No matter how much teams win or how many bonds they share, the might of the apron is inevitable.
Take the Cavaliers, for instance, a 64-win team that was basically a monument to disciplined, creative team-building in the salary-cap era and is now home as a result of some combination of injuries, shooting luck, roster duplication and — we should certainly add — the torrid play of the Pacers.
The Cavs aren't alone. The Eastern Conference's other 60-win juggernaut, the Boston Celtics, faces a virtually identical calculus as they try simultaneously to manage both the potential penalties for a staggering payroll and the fallout from an Achilles injury to Jayson Tatum.
Other rivals still alive and kicking in the postseason — including those Pacers — face faded versions of this same dilemma, either immediately or soon after. Even Oklahoma City won't be immune, though its day of reckoning lies safely tucked away behind a cellar door that won't open for 13 months.
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Life comes at you fast in the NBA, with windows for contention opening wide then slamming shut with ever-quickening cadence, and the new rules only make it faster.
But let's get back to Cleveland. What makes the tough decisions for Cleveland even tougher is something that should have the Cavs beaming: Evan Mobley won Defensive Player of the Year.
Mobley signed a max extension last summer with a 'Rose Rule' provision that pays him 30 percent of the cap if he wins Defensive Player of the Year or makes All-NBA. He's already done the former and is extremely likely to achieve the latter soon, and that adds nearly $8 million to his cap hit next year. (He will make a projected $46.4 million instead of $38.7 million.)
Unfortunately, in the apron world, every dollar counts, even if ownership is willing and able to shoot money out of a firehose. The Cavs are $27.3 million over the projected 2026 luxury-tax line with only 10 players under contract; even if they fill those last four roster spots with minimum contracts, the Cavs will be roughly $34 million over the tax and $15 million over the projected second apron line of $207.8 million.
Being over the second apron subjects Cleveland to a draconian transactional regime. It means the Cavs can't sign any free agents for more than the minimum, can't make any trades that aggregate salary or take on more money than is sent out, can't sign-and-trade their free agents, can't use cash in trades to incentivize salary dumps and may only use rotary-dial land-line phones to make trade calls.
And that calculus is before they spend any money to bring back free agents like Jerome or Sam Merrill or try to add another wing with size or attempt to add another piece by putting their 2031 first-round pick in play.
In theory, the Cavs could damn the torpedoes for a span of two seasons before the real, lasting damage from the second apron hits in the form of a frozen draft pick that is moved to the end of the 2033 first round.
But the tax penalties alone from a roster this expensive are sobering; the Cavs would face a nine-figure luxury-tax bill on top of the roughly $225 million going out in salaries. Between tax and penalties, their team would be nearly twice as expensive as one that stayed at the tax line.
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What's true for the Cavs is more starkly true for Boston, which currently stands $37 million over next year's projected tax line before it spends a single cent to try to bring back Luke Kornet or Al Horford. (One relevant question is whether the 38-year-old Horford might ride off into the sunset if New York eliminates the Celtics this week.)
Tatum's injury on some level makes Boston's decision process easier: Of course they're going to get under the second apron now. (They'll likely get all the way below the tax line to avoid getting further hammered by the 2023 CBA's more draconian repeater tax.) One further note for those asking: Boston will likely get a $27 million injured player exception for Tatum, but this will be functionally irrelevant for its payroll decisions because all that money counts toward the tax and aprons.
The Celtics were already sizing up their need to drop salary in the summer of 2025 even as they were romping to the championship in 2024. Subtract Tatum's injury, and Boston was still wrestling with the certainty of needing to trade at least one of the four expensive core players around him (Jaylen Brown, Kristaps Porziņģis, Jrue Holiday and Derrick White), who alone combine to make $144 million next season.
But, I digress; back to Cleveland: Yes, the Cavs can likely re-sign Jerome using his early Bird rights, but a $10 million salary for him will cost the Cavs … (checks notes) … $62.5 million.
This takes us back to hard choices and to the likely subtraction discussions that the Cavs must have before they even think about additions. The Cavaliers can't have Isaac Okoro soaking up $11 million and being mostly unplayable in the postseason. They probably can't even have Dean Wade at $6 million.
Even Cleveland's good players are questions now. Merrill and Jerome were incredible scrap-heap finds, but both are now due for paydays; can the Cavs afford to upgrade their minimum deals, or do they need to find the next Sam Merrill and Ty Jerome? Hunter is a good player who was a notable upgrade on the departed Georges Niang and Caris LeVert, but is he an indulgent luxury when the five starters alone make $170 million?
Inevitably, that takes us to the elephant in the room: Darius Garland. Under contract for three more years at $167 million, he is both one of the biggest reasons for Cleveland's success and one of the biggest potential vulnerabilities.
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With Donovan Mitchell's strengths (jaw-dropping awesomeness for the first three games against Indiana) and weaknesses (running out of gas in Game 2 and turning into mush in Game 4) on display for a second consecutive postseason run, is Garland the right player to have next to him? Can the Cavs afford to have a backcourt this small, with partners this brittle, and expect to make deep postseason runs? Remember, this is the second straight postseason Cleveland's All-Star core has physically tapped out in May.
The right Garland deal could potentially reinvent the team, loosen up some of the financial strings and keep this Mitchell-Mobley Cleveland core in title contention. The wrong one, or the wrong decision on the other roster spots, could drag this group back to the pack and snuff out their hopes of a second banner.
No pressure, then. But that's the dilemma every good team faces now once its star players age out of rookie contracts; we've already seen Memphis wrestle with it, and Houston and Orlando are up next.
At some level, it's a great problem for Koby Altman and the Cavs front office to have; you only deal with issues like these if you add Mobley and Mitchell and win 64 games in the first place. But that doesn't change the reality of an offseason decision tree that has a lot more dead branches than promising buds.
(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; top photos: Maddie Meyer, Sarah Stier / Getty Images)