We like to talk about how Cleveland got nothing for LeBron James (and how Denver doesn’t want to go down that road).
But that’s not exactly true. Thanks to a might-as-well-at-this-point sign-and-trade, the Cavaliers are sitting on a $14.5 million trade exception. That means the team can trade for a pretty high-priced player and send very little back in return.
So what is Cleveland going to do with that? The News Herald asked Cleveland General Manager Chris Grant that very question.
“It creates more opportunity,” Grant said. “It’s like having $14.5 million in cap space, except you can’t actually go sign a player with it. You can only sign a player into it. It helps you facilitate trades. If a team is in the luxury tax and they want to get out of it, they might give you an asset to do a deal. Maybe you can’t quite make a deal work because the numbers don’t work, you can use that to put players into a trade. It’s a pretty powerful tool. We’ll be aggressive with it as we go into the season.
“We want to be flexible, strategic and not be emotional,” he said.
Good thing Grant has a powerful tool, because he’s got a lot of work ahead of him.
