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NBA Apron Rulebook: Hard-Cap Triggers, Exception Mechanics, and Aggregation Limits by Candidate Team

The full apron rule set from the 2023 collective bargaining agreement, enumerated completely and then mapped onto each team plausibly able to acquire LeBron James. Table one lists every hard-cap trigger with the apron it locks a team to: use of the non-taxpayer mid-level, use of the bi-annual exception, and acquiring a player by sign-and-trade all hard-cap at the first apron, while use of the taxpayer mid-level, aggregating two or more salaries in a trade, taking back more salary than sent out, sending cash in a trade, and signing a bought-out player whose pre-waiver salary exceeded the non-taxpayer mid-level all hard-cap at the second apron. Table two works the exceptions themselves: Bird, Early Bird, and Non-Bird raise ceilings and service-time requirements, mid-level and bi-annual amounts and permitted durations, room exception, and traded-player exception generation and one-year expiry. Table three gives salary-matching bands by tier, including the second-apron bar on aggregation, on taking back more than 100 percent, and the freeze on the first-round pick seven drafts out. Table four maps all of it onto each candidate team's cap position, so a proposed move can be checked against the rule that would actually void it. This is the rules side of the market; the live cap-space matrix is a separate weekly pack, and the two are complementary supply on the same demand. Method: CBA article text, league-issued cap and apron figures, and published team salary commitments are normalized into four linked tables keyed to one team identifier.