A few weeks ago, I discussed what the Bucks need to do to maximize their offseason possibilities while remaining in title contention. With free agency opening today, I looked at how they might use that avenue to upgrade the roster, but as I mentioned, that’s a limited route for the Bucks due to the second apron. In order to sign a free agent to anything more than a minimum contract, they’d need to use the $5.2m taxpayer version of the mid-level exception.
That’s something they can’t do if they’re over the $189.5m second apron, and they also can’t aggregate outgoing salaries together in a trade.