Last season, the Indiana Pacers had a decent amount of cap space. It wasn't a great free agent class, but they decided to spend their money anyway. They were a rebuilding team who were looking for a player to help the young guys out. They found their man in Bruce Brown.
There's nothing wrong with signing Brown on the surface. He had just won a title with the Denver Nuggets and was a key player off the bench. He looked like a guy who was ready to step up and be a starter. What surprised people around the league was how much the Pacers paid him.
Indiana signed Brown to a two-year $45 million contract with $22 million of that guaranteed. That's a lot of money to give a guy who was a sixth man. But when you take a deeper look into the contract and what that allowed Indiana to do, it was actually a genius move.
The Pacers used Bruce Brown's contract perfectly to get Pascal Siakam
The second year of Brown's contract is a team option, but the large cap hit allowed the Pacers to use his contract as the central figure in the Pascal Siakam trade. They traded a guy that they overpaid for someone who has Bird Rights that they can re-sign. They can go over the cap to re-sign him because of those Bird Rights.
When you look at the finances of it all, it's a genius move. The Pacers now have a second star to pair with Tyrese Haliburton because they overpaid for a guy last offseason. They may have written the playbook for other franchises to do something similar with their cap sheet.
With the first and second aprons now a part of the CBA, teams have to find better ways to circumnavigate the cap. This could be a way to do so. It took the Pacers to figure this out for the rest of the NBA though. They were playing chess while everyone else was playing checkers.
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