Guide · 12 min read

The 2023 NBA CBA, in plain English

The 2023 Collective Bargaining Agreement runs 676 pages. You do not need to read them. You need to understand six rules. Get these right and you'll know why every trade tweet either works or doesn't — and why the Hardwood Machine sometimes says "illegal" when you were certain the salaries matched.

1. Salary matching (the tiers)

A team over the salary cap can only take back a limited amount of salary relative to what it's sending out. The limit depends on how much outgoing salary is in the trade:

• Outgoing under $7.5M: can take back outgoing + $7.5M.
• Outgoing $7.5M – $30M: can take back 200% of outgoing (up to $250K over is allowed as a rounding grace).
• Outgoing over $30M: can take back 125% + $250K.

Teams under the cap can absorb any amount up to their remaining cap space, no matching required. The tiers apply per team, not per trade — a three-team deal has to pass the math for each team independently.

2. The first apron ($178M+)

The first apron sits about $7M above the luxury tax line. Teams over the first apron lose three tools:

• Cannot use the non-taxpayer Mid-Level Exception.
• Cannot acquire a player via sign-and-trade — the destination becomes hard-capped at the first apron for the whole season.
• Cannot take back more salary than they send out in a trade (no aggregating small contracts to absorb one bigger one).

3. The second apron ($189M+) — the real hammer

The second apron is where the 2023 CBA gets punitive by design. Teams above the second apron cannot:

• Aggregate two or more players' salaries in a single trade.
• Send out cash in a trade.
• Use the taxpayer Mid-Level Exception.
• Sign a player on the buyout market whose previous salary was above the non-taxpayer MLE.
• Trade a first-round pick seven years out — that pick is frozen, and if the team stays above the second apron in three of the next five years, the pick moves to the end of the first round.

The "no aggregation" rule is the one that catches the most builders. If you're a second-apron team and you want to bring in a $20M player, you cannot combine a $12M contract and a $9M contract to match. You need a single outgoing contract that clears the matching tier on its own.

4. Base Year Compensation (BYC)

BYC applies to players who signed a new contract with their previous team using Bird or Early Bird rights and got a raise of more than 20%. For the first year of that contract, the team trading them away treats their outgoing salary as the greater of half their new salary or their prior salary — while the receiving team gets them at full value.

The upshot: BYC players are almost impossible to trade for equal money in year one of a re-signing. If your proposal involves a player who just signed a big extension over the summer, check whether BYC applies.

5. The poison pill on extended rookies

When a player on his rookie-scale contract signs a rookie extension, his trade value for the rest of the current season is the average of the current-year salary and the new extension years — from the outgoing team's perspective. The incoming team receives the player at his current, much lower salary. This is why extended rookies (Tyrese Haliburton, Jalen Brunson at signing, Anthony Edwards) are effectively untradeable for the balance of the extension season.

6. The Stepien Rule and the seven-pick rule

Named after Cleveland's 1980s owner who traded away every first-round pick he had, the Stepien Rule says a team cannot be without a first-round pick in two consecutive future drafts. Your team must own its own or an equally-good pick in either the current year or the year after, forever. Second-rounders are unaffected.

The seven-pick rule is a companion: a team can only trade first-round picks up to seven drafts into the future. In 2025, that horizon is 2032.

Putting it together

The trade machine on this site enforces all six rules, per team, in real time. When it rejects a proposal, the reason box tells you exactly which rule fired. You don't have to remember whether the Suns are second-apron this year — the tool checks live cap-sheet data and flags aggregation for you. But once you know why the rule exists, you'll start seeing the shape of every "impossible" trade rumor differently.