Re: TODAY'S GLOBE

[Ken Kokubo <kkokubo@pobox.harvard.edu>]

First off I believe Knights contract put them up to the cap, this was
before Dino cleared waivers, etc.

Yes you can use the Larry Bird exemtion on your own FA's. However your FA's
salaries count towards the cap until you either renounce them or resign
them (then they count the amount of their new salary).

So basically once it was out that Knight had (even in principle only)
agreed to go to the C's his contract counts towards the cap (this came out
on a sat if I remember and the league told Pitino to have the ink dry and
the everything resolved by mon am). And since that put them up to the limit
of the cap they were forced to renounce all their FA's. If for example they
signed Fox first then they wouldn't have enough money under the cap to sign
Knight.

What could have happened was Knight didn't say anything, the Dino mess got
cleared up (freeing up the extra 2.5 million which would be enough money to
"hold" fox and conlon) they sign Knight, then they resign Fox and Conlon
going over the cap.

Then they would have had the 1 mil exemption to sign a DeClerqc/Massenberg
if they were willing.

(and if Pitino had tried to wrangle something after the league found
outabout the contract we probably would have been in a situation similar to
Miami's in that Knight would go back to the Lakers and we would end up
paying a penalty or something)

something like that


>
>Most were worthless, but I believed Knight leaked that they had reached an
>agreement, much like Antonio Daniels did last week and in order to sign
>Knight he had to renounce the salary on all the players involved.  I am not
>sure why the larry Bird exception would not apply to Fox, maybe since he
>had already declared for free agency they could no longer use this  to go
>over the cap to sign Fox ?