The main argument I've been hearing about why we shouldn't match Lin's offer sheet is his contract will restrict our ability to sign free agents in the future, especially in year 3 of his deal. This spreadsheet is my attempt to show our cap situation, without Lin, for the next four years and how Lin's contract won't be the one that doesn't allow us to use exceptions in the future; assuming no major trade, we'll probably only have the mini-MLE no matter what.

A couple of notes:

• All salaries for players under a previous contract are taken from hoopshype.com
• For new contracts I did my best to figure out the yearly salaries based on the reported total salary and the assumption that they'd be getting the maximum possible raise each year. Even if the yearly numbers aren't completely correct, I believe the potential difference is less than $1M total per year.
• I'm assuming we're picking up every player's option
• We have our own 1st round pick next year and decided that we're picking 26th overall since I had to pick something.
• Ray Felton's deal hasn't been finalized and there are conflicting reports about what he'll be getting. 3-years/$10M is the most common report so I used that for the totals. I included the rumored 4-year/$18M at the bottom of the spreadsheet.
• I have no way of knowing what the salary cap and luxury tax will be in future seasons. I decided to increase it each year by 7.5%, the same amount as the maximum yearly increase for a player's salary. If anyone knows where I can find past season's salary caps I'd like to use that data instead.
• This list only included players who I know will be under contract for us. But, we will be able to use the mini-MLE to sign free agents and we don't have 12 players under contract in any year. If we use the full mini-MLE it will increase our cap hit by about $3M each time we use it. If all we do is sign UDFA their minimum salary is about $500K.