One frequently asked question: what options would the Warriors have if Kevin Durant decides to leave during next July’s free-agent period? It’s a logical question, as the NBA salary-cap structure is complicated and the Collective Bargaining Agreement does not allow teams to just replace stars that change teams via free agency.

The basics
The NBA’s most recent projection is for a $109 million salary cap in 2019-20. The Warriors have $80.2 million in fully guaranteed salary that season owed to five players: Stephen Curry, Draymond Green, Andre Iguodala, Damian Jones and Jacob Evans. On top of that, they can either choose to keep Shaun Livingston for $7.7 million, waive him at a cost of $2 million or find a trade partner.

On top of that, the Warriors will have their 2019 first-round pick, Alfonzo McKinnie’s $1.6 million non-guaranteed contract, two restricted free agents (Jordan Bell and Quinn Cook) and a whopping five unrestricted free agents if Durant declines his $31.5 million player option as expected.

The pending free agents: Durant, Klay Thompson, DeMarcus Cousins, Kevon Looney and Jonas Jerebko. As such, the only way for the Warriors to generate significant cap space would be if all of their unrestricted free agents left, including Durant and Thompson. In that most extreme case, the team could get to somewhere around $20 million in cap space but would have a lot of holes to fill.

The most likely outcome if Durant leaves
If Durant leaves and Thompson stays, the expectation should be that the Warriors would function as an over-the-cap team. One big element to watch in this situation would be how the front office navigates the luxury tax. If the Warriors keep McKinnie and Livingston on the books, general manager Bob Myers would have about $41 million to spend if ownership wants to avoid the repeater tax. Considering Thompson’s maximum would be $32.7 million at the current cap estimate, staying under the tax seems unlikely unless Thompson takes meaningfully less than his maximum. The more likely paths are staying a tax team with a smaller bill or at least Livingston playing elsewhere.

The other major difference between being over and under the tax relates to which exceptions are available to the front office. A franchise that functions as an over-the-cap team but is not in the luxury tax gets a bigger mid-level exception (currently $9.2 million vs. $5.7 million) and the bi-annual exception, projected to be worth $3.6 million.

Either way, the front office’s best available option to add talent in this scenario would be the MLE; presumably they would target a Durant replacement at small forward. Unfortunately for them, that is the most in-demand position in the league right now; with so many teams having cap space that means any worthwhile small-forward option would be leaving significant money on the table to join the Warriors for the MLE.

That said, it would not be surprising to see a player who missed out on the early rush of signings take a cheaper one-year deal to start on a title contender. It is still far too early to speculate about what player that could be, but the pool of possibilities is uncomfortably shallow, especially since restricted free agents would be functionally off the table because any offer the Warriors could make would be cheap enough that their current team would match.

One other option would be to acquire someone by trade, presumably involving draft picks. The problem there is that the Warriors have extremely little filler salary, so any deal would presumably involve Iguodala, Livingston or both and that brings its own pain. There are of course scenarios where that makes sense unless moving Iguodala foments a mutiny from the remaining star players. Additionally, it should be noted that the Warriors would probably need to acquire someone already under contract because teams over the luxury tax cannot bring in a player via sign-and-trade.

The other path: Sign-and-trade
Thanks to adjustments in the CBA negotiated shortly after LeBron James and Chris Bosh took their talents to South Beach, both of which were technically done via sign-and-trade, players now cannot make more money with a new team through a sign-and-trade than they would signing with the team normally.

That has dramatically limited the once-popular transaction, which now functions as a plausible remaining path in the somewhat rare situations when a team wanted to sign a player but couldn’t pay him the agreed-upon terms outright due to a lack of cap space.

In this case, the scenario would have to set up this way: Durant chooses to go to a team that needs to clear salary either to have enough space to sign him or potentially someone else and the Warriors basically offer to be the intermediary, taking on something that trade partner was looking to offload, presumably for an asset. The most likely possibility here is the Knicks, as they can finesse their way to a single max slot without too much pain but need to move significant salary to bring in two new stars.

At that point, Myers could reach out to the Knicks and suggest that instead of giving another team picks or players to take on some salary, they could do so with the Warriors instead. While New York’s players are not necessarily values on their contracts, especially with Courtney Lee’s strange injury situation at the moment, a sign-and-trade would allow the Warriors to add depth without tying up any of their exceptions, though doing so would effectively guarantee putting the Warriors into the luxury tax for at least the 2019-20 season. Plus, a Warriors/Knicks trade avoids the potential pitfalls of a team helping out someone in their own conference, which sometimes scuttles mutually beneficial trades.

While there are many variables to consider, a potential Durant departure would leave the Warriors with a similar dynamic to what they had in the final two seasons before his arrival, albeit with a roster four years older than they were at the start of the historic 2015-16 season.

(Photo:  Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images)