Some fans fell in love with the NBA because of their passion for basketball. Others developed their allegiance through an attachment to a specific team or player.
But if you just so happen to love the league because of the intricacies of its collective bargaining agreement, this is your moment.
While the 2025 NBA offseason is only a few days old, its biggest star has already emerged. No, it’s not Kevin Durant, Giannis Antetokounmpo or even Cooper Flagg. Rather, it’s the second apron of the league’s salary cap, which has already proven to be the driving force behind some of this offseason’s most significant moves.
Look no further than the Boston Celtics’ approach, in which they have already traded Jrue Holiday to the Portland Trail Blazers and Kristaps Porziņģis to the Atlanta Hawks. One year after raising Banner No. 18, Celtics fans are now celebrating trading away two key players — not because of who they got in return, but because the deals helped shed $27.2 million in salary and approximately $180 million in luxury taxes. Most importantly, the Celtics are no longer a second apron team.
What exactly is the second apron? That seems to be the question that everybody who isn’t already a CBA aficionado seems to be asking. Such was the case on Wednesday morning’s episode of First Take, as Brian Windhorst did his best to explain it during a discussion regarding Denver Nuggets president Josh Kroenke recent comments about a hypothetical Nikola Jokić trade.
“The biggest thing that you have to understand is it used to be when you were a big-spending team, it just cost you money. The farther you went into the salaries, the more you had to pay. And if your owner was wealthy enough, it didn’t really matter,” Windhorst explained. “Now, because owners kept paying, they changed the rules and so now it takes your ability to change your team away from you. And that is very scary.
“Not only that, it takes away, in some cases, your ability to trade draft picks and even make draft picks into the future. And so teams really don’t want to be into it. And so, you look at a team like Boston that is in the worst case scenario, which is the scenario that Kroenke was describing there, which is in the second apron with the star player hurt. And so now you’ve got Boston having to make trades where they’re essentially giving away players.”
Roughly an hour later, Pat McAfee asked Shams Charania the exact same question during a similar discussion on his own daily show.
“When I talk to teams, they just consider it to be something of a hard cap, right?” Charania said of the second apron. “And that starts with the first apron. And that comes with more punitive taxes. And then the second apron is really where it’s been described to me as everything just freezes up. Your exceptions freeze up, your ability to make trades sometimes are frozen up.
“You have to like get to a certain salary [figure], otherwise you can’t make trades, you can’t make sign-and-trades. And that all makes roster-building, essentially you’re limited to minimums every single year potentially. And so those are all issues that come with the second apron.”
There are more thorough and technical explanations available elsewhere, but the biggest takeaway seems to be this: if your team is in the second apron, its ability to improve its roster in any meaningful way will be severely limited. And that has big implications — not just for the Celtics, but every contender, including the reigning champion Oklahoma City Thunder.
So whether it’s via Windhorst, Charania, or online explainers, it’s time to study up. Because with the current CBA locked in through the 2029-30 season, this doesn’t seem like a conversation that will be going away anytime soon.