Do you happen to know what the actual math is? (I'm asking because I don't think I do.)Don't really see it changing things honestly. They could do a trade with us for a lot of reasons... to get some breathing room from the tax for next year for instance. They still have to do something and it almost certainly involves Schroeder.
I still doubt Smart is really available but maybe the extension scares them a lot. If they want to swap J Rich for JC the tax math is a little easier without the AS bump for Brown but they still have to move Nesmith or Schroeder for less salary.
I mentioned a day or two ago that Spotrac showed $2.7 million for them to get under the cap, while Marks gave a figure somewhere under a million. Today when I saw about Brown's all-star bonus, I figured that that's part of the answer for why the two numbers differ, but it can't be the full answer. There are perhaps other bonuses that may or may not kick in that Marks and Keith Smith are counting differently?
But $1.4 million is a pretty big difference when you're that close to the threshold. It might turn out to be the difference between needing to find a team to take on a useful player or just finding a team to take on Bruno Fernando's salary, for example.