Building a NBA Cap Sheet Website

v1 of (probably) many

I like basketball, and I like rules. So, naturally, I keep track of each team’s cap sheets. I’ve done this in Excel for a few seasons, but I figured it was worth putting into a more shareable form.

You can check them out at lukesbasketballwebsite.com. This is really quite similar to the already very good cap sheets on the internet (Spotrac, CapSheets, FanSpo, SalarySwish, to name a few). I’ve made changes according to how I personally like to track these things, but I won’t sit here and say I’ve done anything revolutionary.

Just click on the team on the home page to get to the team page. Each team page shows a multi-year breakdown of their financial picture. Here’s a look at Philadelphia’s:

A few notes on the above:

• The top-line figures update as you sort by a given year.

• You can toggle between $ value and % of that year’s cap. I find it pretty helpful to contextualize future salary figures.

• If you hover over non-guaranteed/partially guaranteed amounts, it will give you the amount of the guarantee.

• You can click on the drop-down for cap allocations, tax allocations, and apron allocations to see how each is calculated.

• You can download each team’s information to an Excel spreadsheet. I probably need to make this download into a better format, but tbd. I just figured it is hard enough to get all of this information in one spot, so any download format would do.

• I’m workshopping what I’m calling a “Scenario Mode,” which is an interactive cap sheet. You can trade, sign, and waive players. This is very much a work in progress, but I’ve found it moderately helpful when thinking through potential transactions.

There is also a league summary tab, which shows the top-line figures for each team:

And there is a reference values tab that shows a few tables of the leaguewide financial projections used:

A few improvements/additions I already have in mind:

1. Building out the interactive cap sheet portion into an all-in-one transaction simulator (trade machine, free agency, draft picks, etc.).

2. Putting together a historical team cap sheet database for as far back as I can get reliable data on. I think this would help with some of the team building research questions I’ve been exploring.

3. Including each team’s owned draft picks and draft rights on each team page.

Much of this is in the works; there are just a lot of rules to code in.

I’ll be updating as transactions occur throughout the league. Given the trade deadline is this week, expect a good bit of changes.

In the meantime, let me know if you think of any features that could be useful here. Also, let me know of any bugs that pop up — I’m sure there will be more than a few.