4 important things to know before Cavs trade for Donovan Mitchell

4 things before Cavs trade for Donovan Mitchell: Matching Salary

There are three ways to acquire a player in a trade. The first is to acquire them into cap space; if a team’s salaries add up to a total sufficiently below the salary cap to add the incoming salary entirely, then the acquiring team doesn’t need to worry about sending out a certain amount of salary to match. This is the rarest version of a star trade.

The second is for a team to use an available trade exception. A trade exception is generated when a team trades a player and receives back less than their salary in return; the New Orleans Pelicans generated one when they traded Eric Bledsoe and Steven Adams to the Memphis Grizzlies for less returning salary, and then used that exception as part of the CJ McCollum deal (which in turn generated a trade exception that the Portland Trail Blazers used to acquire Jerami Grant. Round and round we go).

The Cleveland Cavaliers currently have no cap space, and their two trade exceptions are both tiny; $858k from dumping Denzel Valentine on the New York Knicks, and a mere $300k from the Ricky Rubio trade to Indiana (Rubio made $300k more than Caris LeVert last season). Neither is enough to acquire any player, let alone Donovan Mitchell’s $30.35 million deal.

Therefore the Cavs will need to send out at least 75 percent of his salary back to the Utah Jazz to make this deal work. They have a few different paths to do so. The easiest would simply be to trade Kevin Love with draft capital, but the Jazz are likely going to want valuable players instead. That could be some combination of Caris LeVert, Lauri Markkanen, Cedi Osman or Collin Sexton in a sign-and-trade. We’ll dive into what the Jazz may want in a moment, but it’s important to keep in mind that the Cavs can’t just add Mitchell; they have to send back players in return.