How These Numbers Are Built

Where the numbers come from

Salary figures are compiled by hand into a single workbook from public reporting and the terms of the 2023 Collective Bargaining Agreement. This site is generated directly from that workbook, so the figure on the page is the cell I edited — there is no second copy to drift out of sync. Every page shows the date it was last built, which is the date the workbook was last exported.

How to read a cap sheet

Each team page lists the active roster season by season, with cap holds, dead money and two-way deals shown separately from guaranteed salary. The colour on a salary cell tells you who controls that year:

• Team option — the team decides whether the year happens.
• Player option — the player decides.
• Mutual option — both sides have to agree.
• Non-guaranteed — on the books, but not owed if the player is waived before the guarantee date.
• Estimated salary — a projected figure, not a reported one. Treat these as the softest numbers on the site.

A cell reading UFA or RFA with a dollar figure is not a signed contract. It is the free agent status that season plus a projected value, shown so you can see the shape of the decision coming rather than a blank column.

Cap space, tax room and apron room

Each of the four figures on a team page is that threshold minus the team’s 2026–27 payroll. A positive number is room remaining below the line; a negative number is the amount the team is already over it. The four thresholds for 2026–27 are listed at the top of this page and are the same on every page of the site.

The cap bar on each team page plots payroll against all four lines at once, which is the fastest way to see not just whether a team is over, but which of the four cliffs it is sitting between.

Updates

The site is rebuilt from the workbook whenever the underlying data changes — signings, waivers, trades, guarantee dates and option decisions. During the trade deadline and the opening week of free agency that can be several times a day; in the quiet parts of the calendar it can be weekly. The build date at the top of every page is the honest answer to how current you are looking at.

Known limits

These are projections assembled from public information, not official league accounting. Specifically:

• Figures can differ from the league office’s own numbers, and can differ from other public cap sites, which make different assumptions.
• Incentives are difficult to source publicly, and the likely/unlikely split that determines whether they count against the cap is not always reported.
• Trade exceptions, cap holds and estimated salaries all carry more uncertainty than a reported, guaranteed salary does.
• Tax bills are estimates based on current payroll and will move with every transaction between now and the end of the regular season.

Corrections

If you find an error, email 12jjthomas@gmail.com with the team or player and what you believe the right figure is. I would rather be corrected than be wrong quietly. Fixes go into the workbook and ship on the next build.

Reuse

Everything published here is free to reuse with attribution under CC BY 4.0. If you use a table or a figure in an article, a video or a post, a link back to the page you took it from is all that is asked.