Salary Cap Question

[gin500]

so the salary cap for this yr is set at 49.5M and the luxury tax threshold is at 61.7M. my question is this: lets say your team had a total of 55M of salaries last season, with total expiring contracts worth 7M thereby setting your salary totals for next season at 48M. being 1.5M under the cap, does this mean you can only offer up to 1.5M to FAs from other teams(assuming you don't want to re-sign any of your own free agents)? with no cap exceptions, you can't offer anything higher than 1.5M? or does the league allow you to offer somethin higher than the 1.5M?

[Amente]

The amount of the MLE is the difference.

In other words if the MLE is $5 mil and you are only $2 mil under the cap you can give the league notice that you wish to be classified as like a team over the cap and that you will use your $5 mil MLE rather than the cap space. It's the team's choice as to if they will use the cap space which is under the MLE amount or use the MLE itself.