The NBA’s new Collective Bargaining Agreement will introduce a new cap exception for second-round draft picks, reports Shams Charania of The Athletic.
Under the current system, teams sign their first-round picks to four-year contracts using the “rookie scale exception,” with the compensation amounts dependent on the player’s exact draft position. But if a team wants to sign its second-round pick for more than the rookie minimum or for more than two seasons, it must use cap room or an exception such as the mid-level.
While we don’t yet know exactly what the second-round pick exception will look like, Charania suggests that teams will no longer have to use their mid-level exceptions when they sign their second-rounders to their first NBA contracts, so the new exception should allow for deals up to three or four years.