View Full Version : Can someone explain what "Bird rights" are?

03-18-2005, 12:18 AM
I've heard the term in various contexts but have no idea what any of them mean...

Bird rights,

Bird exception,

Bird rule......

Thanks for the help!!!:cool:

03-18-2005, 12:30 AM
A player has to be under contract for at least 3 consecutive years without being waived or changing teams as a free agent in order for the team to have Bird rights on that player. It doesn't have to be a 3 year contract. A player can sign 3 1 year contracts with the same team, and the team would have Bird rights after the 3rd 1 year contract.

With Bird rights, a team can go over the salary cap to sign a player with the only restriction being the maximum salary.

03-18-2005, 12:36 AM
In addition, teams using their bird rights to re-signin a player can give HIGHER annual increases in salary than any other NBA team, so they can pay him more money than anybody else, too.

03-18-2005, 08:57 AM
It is of course called the Bird rights because the Boston Celtics were over the salary cap, Larry was a free agent and they got the league to allow them to give him a big contract even though they did not have room under the cap.

03-18-2005, 09:49 AM
A good example of how this works is our current situation with Dale Davis.

Because Davis was waived before signing with the Pacers, the Pacers do not have the Bird rights to Dale Davis, even though he now plays for us.

This means that because we are over the cap we can only use the mid level exception in signing Davis, meaning the max Davis can get from us is about five million (the exact amount of the MLE won't be known until July).

If another team under the cap wanted to sign Davis for more the MLE, the Pacers could not match the offer.

(I realize $5 million is probably more than Davis will be offered by anyone this off season, I just use his situation as an example)