Welcome to the Second Apron Era

The luxury tax used to be the line that separated the big spenders from everyone else. Fourteen of the NBA’s thirty teams are over it this season. But the tax is just a bill. The 2023 CBA drew two new lines above it, and the second apron, at $221.7 million this season, is where roster-building actually starts to hurt: crossing it triggers the CBA’s escalating restrictions on trades, signings, and even future draft picks. Which makes the most interesting number on this year’s chart a zero. Nobody is over it.

Three front offices have walked their cap number right up to the line and stopped. Orlando leads the league at $221.1 million, $548,693 under the second apron. Denver is $616,852 under. Golden State, after an offseason of reporting that had them comfortably past it, sits $1.9 million clear. That is not an accident three times over; it’s the apron doing exactly what it was designed to do. The punishment is severe enough that the league’s biggest spenders are managing their rosters to the dollar to stay on the survivable side of it.

One line down, the traffic jam: eight teams are over the first apron, and the door is crowded in both directions. Philadelphia is over it by $77,519, roughly the price of a well-optioned pickup truck, in a league where the average cap number runs $195.3 million. Cleveland ($469,717 under) and Miami ($721,281 under) are doing the same dance from the other side. When six teams live within a million dollars of the same threshold, that threshold is the standings race nobody prints.

Four teams are under the salary cap entirely, and the floor has its own drama. Memphis carries the league’s lowest cap number at $146.4 million, across a camp roster of 22 contracts, and here’s the catch: their fifteen largest cap hits sum to $2.1 million below the CBA’s minimum team salary. Cutting down to a regular-season roster only lowers that number. One way or another, the Grizzlies are required to spend their way over the floor before the ledger closes. Top to bottom, the gap between Orlando and Memphis is $74.7 million, half a salary cap’s worth of daylight.

Thresholds are the league’s official 2026-27 figures (the cap rose 6.7% from last season’s $154.6 million). Team figures are cap numbers: the fifteen largest cap hits per team, transcribed from Basketball-Reference on September 17, with veteran minimums counted at the two-year-vet rate the tax and aprons are actually measured against.

For the current picture, the

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