Even more importantly, however, because you can pretty much always match salaries in trades, teams that are over the cap can acquire big contracts at least as easily as teams that are under, without having to starve their team of talent to do so. Or, they can shed salary when they need to — not as the culmination of years of austerity planning but just when the opportunity to spend arises — and maybe not only add players, but maybe draft picks or other useful tools to get better in the process. Case in point: the Mavs had considerably more cap space than the Chicago Bulls this offseason, when the former had prospectively the third most cap space in the league. But the latter managed to add DeMar Derozan, Nikola Vucevic, Lonzo Ball, and Alex Caruso as supporting cast around Zach LaVine, whereas the Mavs added… Reggie Bullock.
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