After two dramatically different Conference Finals, the Miami Heat and San Antonio Spurs are just four wins away from the NBA Championship and greatly enhanced legacies. While there are plenty of storylines to cover, there are also more than enough writers to cover the off-the-court stuff. As such, I will focus on how the series itself will play out.

When Miami has the ball

Part of what makes the Heat so interesting is that the glue of their offense is scoring at the basket even though they are middle of the road in terms of how many attempts they get at the rim per game. The reason they stand out here is that they made an astonishing 71.1 percent of these shots, standing at No. 1 in the league by a clear margin. Unfortunately for the Heat, the Spurs have two effective interior defenders and held opponents to the third-worst effectiveness at the rim behind only the Nuggets and Pacers. While San Antonio has both Tim Duncan and Tiago Splitter to man the paint, Miami would be wise to work on getting them in foul trouble because the frontcourt depth of the Spurs comes in players like Boris Diaw and Matt Bonner rather than rim protectors.

On the perimeter, the Spurs will probably throw different players on LeBron James because no one player has the stamina and ability to handle him for an entire game. Kawhi Leonard will take the lead, but I worry that he will not be able to deal with the quickness of James, especially since Leonard is not strong enough to exert that as an advantage over him. The other matchups should be reasonable for San Antonio since Danny Green and the rest of the swingmen will have the size, savvy, and support to handle Dwyane Wade and Gregg Popovich knows that the best way to defend Wade is to allow his bad jump shooting instincts to take over. San Antonio’s help defense will make posting up one of the perimeter players a less successful endeavor.

The Spurs’ biggest problem comes when Miami plays LeBron at power forward and has enough shooters at the other spots to keep either Splitter or Duncan out of position. The lack of defensive versatility of San Antonio’s collection of forwards, except for Leonard, will make this an incredibly difficult proposition for San Antonio since Splitter and Duncan cannot defend someone like Mike Miller or James and Miami has the ball rotation to ensure that the right players get the right looks. The first two games of the series against the Warriors showed how the Spurs can have problems with teams who have multiple dangerous perimeter scorers and Memphis did not have the offensive talent out there to exploit that matchup. Miami does. 

When San Antonio has the ball

We have heard a good deal of talk about how the Spurs can exploit the Heat on the interior like Indiana did in the Eastern Conference Finals. The smaller lineups Miami employed so frequently during the regular season will be particularly susceptible since both Duncan and Splitter can score effectively on the interior. Interestingly, while the Pacers were fourth in the entire NBA in offensive rebounding during the regular season, San Antonio was second from the bottom and actually trailed Miami in this department. The Spurs will not give away as many possessions via turnovers but will need to ramp up the intensity on the offensive boards to generate additional quality scoring chances.

The biggest factor on this end will be whether Miami can handle Tony Parker. Part of what makes Parker so difficult to defend is that he can create for himself and others quickly and effectively with an excellent supporting cast that can maximize the opportunities they get. San Antonio’s ball movement has been phenomenal throughout the Popovich/Parker era and this year’s squad led the NBA in assist ratio (the proportion of possessions that end in assists) after many seasons of being close to the top. I fully expect to see LeBron defending Tony Parker during the fourth quarter of close games and Miami does not need Mario Chalmers and Norris Cole on the floor offensively so the team will not suffer from playing bigger if need be. A crunch time lineup of LeBron, Wade, Bosh, Chris Andersen and either Ray Allen or Mike Miller could pose problems for San Antonio’s offense and put pressure on Danny Green and Manu Ginobili to hit open shots and create offense for the rest of the team. 

Overall take

While San Antonio has the size to exploit Miami’s greatest weakness, they will use their advantage there differently than Indiana because their identity comes as much from Parker as from Duncan. Parker’s offensive skills will be put to the test when the most physically gifted perimeter defender in the league guards him and this series should be the greatest challenge for the rest of the offense in years.

If Bosh and Wade can combine for four or five quality games (meaning one, the other, or both did reasonably well), they should be able to ride LeBron and their potent offense to the championship. However, Wade and Bosh did not deliver even that much against Indiana. I see them bringing it just enough to give Miami a six game series win after they take both of the first two home games and then steal one of the three in San Antonio. 

In Chad Ford’s latest mock draft, he wrote about how the Dallas Mavericks could draft a player like Dario Saric and then stated that “Dallas can get him off the cap with an agreement from Saric that he won't come to the NBA this season.”

Section 4(e)(2) on page 165 of the CBA states that:

In the event that a First Round Pick signs with a non-NBA team, the player’s applicable Rookie Scale Amount shall be excluded from the Team Salary of the Team that holds his draft rights, beginning on the date he signs such non-NBA contract or the first day of the Regular Season, whichever is later.

This means that the cap hold for any first round pick stays on the books until the first day of the NBA regular season even if Saric or any other player drafted in the first round (no matter their nationality) signs a deal with a non-NBA team at any point during the summer. While there would be a small savings over having the pick on roster for 2013-14 since nearly every first round pick signs for more than slot in practice, that is different than clearing the contract off the ledgers and getting to use that cap space.

But Section 4(e)(3) allows a team to have the player's applicable Rookie Scale Amount excluded from its Team Salary prior to the first day of any Regular Season as long as the NBA is notified in writing.

Editor's Note: A previous edition of this article incorrectly stated that it would not be possible for the Mavericks to draft a European players and have his salary be taken off their cap.

The Chicago Bulls have used that provision to remove Nikola Mirotic's cap hold, as have the Mavericks with Petteri Koponen.

Leroux's Correction: I made a mistake in interpreting a separate but relevant part of the pertinent section. While (2) reads as above (and is interpreted correctly, incidentally), a subsequent section discusses an alternate possibility that could potentially be used here as well. (3) of the same section and sub-section details a circumstance where separate and accompanying written statements from both the team and the player in question submitted before the start of the regular season can take the hold off the books for that league year while retaining future rights.

While strange because it functionally weakens what comes directly before it in the CBA, (3) dictates that these twin statements could take the hold off the books one year at a time. It is a frustrating mistake and I take full responsibility for making it while also apologizing fully to both Mr. Ford and my readers. I sincerely regret my misread and will do my absolute best moving forward to not make similar mistakes.

On Friday, I was reading the comments on an ESPN article and noticed someone talking about how the Golden State Warriors will have $50 million in cap space in 2014. While asking why I was reading the comment section on an ESPN article might be a better question, it felt necessary and appropriate to put together a little primer on how to make an estimate of how much space a team will have to work with. Keep in mind this is a quick way of doing so rather than full depth.

The biggest misconception out there has to be that expiring contracts and cap room are the same thing. There are two ways that they diverge: teams can be over the cap (so not all of the salary coming off converts into cap room) and players/picks retained by the team in question do not go off the books entirely due to cap holds.

Since the commenter in question used the Golden State Warriors in 2014, I will use that as the example of how to make a rough estimation of cap space.

1. Find a contract site that you like and trust. Of the publically accessible sites, my personal favorite is Storytellers.

2. Estimate the salary cap for the year in question. While we never know the cap for future seasons ahead of time, I like to ballpark it by increasing the cap about $2 million per season in the future. Since the cap sits at $58 million right now, the rough guess for the 14-15 cap would be $62 million.

3. Figure out who the team in question has under contract for that season, giving your best guess for team and player options. In the case of the Warriors, they have David Lee, Stephen Curry, Harrison Barnes, Klay Thompson, Festus Ezeli and Draymond Green under contract for a combined $33,795,136. Theoretically, this would lead to $28.2 million in cap space. However, there are a few key additional steps to include.

4. If a team has less than 12 players under contract at any point in the summer, the league puts in cap holds at the minimum rookie salary (since theoretically they would have to use those to fill the spots if everything filled up) that take away space. The 14-15 Warriors have six players under contract, so six minimum salary holds at $507,336 for 14-15 would add up to $3,044,016 and reduce the estimated cap space to $25.16 million.

5. If the team has any players who they drafted but are playing in Europe, their cap holds come back on the books in the summer unless the team renounces them. Replace any minimum holds with these numbers if applicable (particularly guys like Nikola Mirotic taken in the first round).

6. Replace any minimum salary holds with draft pick holds for any first round picks between now and then. For the Warriors, this is a 2014 first round pick, so I will ballpark that as a $500k increase over the minimum hold. Their space is now down to $24.66 million.

7. Look at any players whose contracts expire between now and then. If the team will want to bring them back, adding in a number for a cap hold is a good idea. If the person will be paid more in that season than they were under their previous contract, a good rough number to use is their most recent salary multiplied by 1.5 (unless this puts the player over the max) since that is the minimum increase in the cap hold for a Bird rights free agent. If you think the player will make a smaller salary than that number, just use your estimate for their contract instead.

8. In the context of the Warriors, the big question mark here is Andrew Bogut. If they want to retain him, his cap hold will actually be a max hold for around $17.5 million. The only ways to reduce that number would be to sign him for less than that or renounce him and then be unable to use Bird rights to get him back. If you think the Warriors will retain Bogut, it would be best to estimate his salary (I’ll use $10 million the first year) and take that off the cap space. That would cut the number down to $15.33 million. That cap space reduces further if you think the team will bring Brandon Rush, Jarrett Jack, or Carl Landry back and/or sign any free agents this summer to multi-year contracts.

9. By now you have a good rough estimate on cap room. The last number to consider is the Mid-Level exception. As an exception, the MLE actually counts against the cap space unless a team officially chooses not to use it. For 2014, the non-taxpayer MLE is $5.305 million. If that $5.3 million takes up more room than the team has, they are effectively capped out and would use the MLE instead of cap space.

Hopefully this process can help explain how this process works and be used to make more accurate estimations of what teams will have to work with moving forward. 

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