The Bulls do not need to reach the 'salary floor', stop saying that

Let's kill this thing.

This is a worrisome trend, if you believe two tweets make a trend.

Bulls pitched 1- and 2-year deals to all targets. This gets them to salary floor. Previously, there were no plans to waive Calderon.

— K.C. Johnson (@KCJHoop) July 3, 2016

Bulls had to hit cap floor somehow. Still leave themselves flexibility for future. https://t.co/sE1QZqGBir

— Nick Friedell (@NickFriedell) July 3, 2016

Hopefully this is just a couple beat writers getting their interested piqued by the concept of a 'Salary Floor' and not knowing exactly what it means. Because it is kind of wild concept to think about, I guess. A mandated league minimum that teams have to spend? Is that causing all these ca-ra-zay NBA contracts being passed out already? I've heard of a cap, but a floor?!? Should call them salary shoes, right?

OK, maybe it's not that interesting. But there must be some kind of psychological property that makes people want to rationalize dumb things like the Rajon Rondo contract, because if it's not the awful idea of 'actually, Rondo will make the Bulls worse so this is GarPaxDorf smartly trying to improve their draft picks'...it's this salary floor thing.

Just hope that nobody is getting this information leaked out from the team, because that'd be extremely worrisome. It'd definitely be an indication that they have to un-retire their cap guru (again). Because the 'salary floor' doesn't really mean anything.

The Sixers had to kind of go through this perception-fighting while in the Hinkie abyss, but if you look at the CBA, there are key points about the salary floor beyond its establishment of 90% of the salary cap that make it not worth sweating, especially during free agency.

1. There's no actual penalty for failing to reach the floor. The difference just gets paid out to the existing players on the roster.
2. It's assessed on the last day of the regular season.

The Sixers, nor anybody else, have failed to reach the floor so far. What's typically happened is a team will acquire a player midseason, where their salary gets counted towards the total used to calculate in regards to the floor/cap/tax, but they won't actually have to pay the player that full years' salary since they started the year on another team.

So, no: the Bulls signing Rondo had nothing to do with the salary floor. At least let's hope not.

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