The Victors

Thank to ChatGPT, here's the list of what happens to a team that goes over the second apron:

1. No mid-level exception. A second-apron team can't use the taxpayer MLE to add a free agent. That largely leaves minimum contracts, draft picks, and mechanisms for retaining its own players.

2. You can't aggregate salaries in trades. This is a huge one. You can't take, say, two $10M players and combine them to acquire a $20M player. That severely limits consolidation trades.

3. You can't take back more salary than you send out. Trades become much harder because you're generally looking for deals where the incoming salary is equal to or below what you're sending out.

4. You can't send cash out in trades. That's another useful sweetener removed from the GM's toolbox.

5. Certain trade exceptions become unavailable. In particular, the CBA restricts second-apron teams from using previously generated trade exceptions in ways that would otherwise facilitate acquisitions.

6. Your distant first-round pick gets frozen. If you finish the regular season above the second apron, your first-round pick seven drafts later becomes untradeable.
Repeated second-apron spending can move that pick to the end of Round 1. If you're over the second apron in at least two of the next four seasons after the pick is frozen, that frozen pick gets moved to the end of the first round, regardless of how bad your record might be that year. If you're at or below the apron in at least three of those four seasons, the pick is unfrozen instead.

7. And you're paying a potentially enormous luxury-tax bill. The apron isn't itself another tax rate—the tax is calculated from how far you're above the luxury-tax line—but a team at second-apron payroll levels is already deep into tax territory.

In short, the restrictions on second apron teams limit the GM's ability to use a bunch of valuable roster construction tools. It's not quite a hard cap but it comes damn close.