I have some questions for those of you who consider yourselves experts on understanding the collective bargaining agreement and how the salary cap works.  My questions revolve around the NBA Salary Cap FAQ questions #29 - 32.  Basically, I want to know what the Wizards options are with pursuing a big name free agent and still resigning our own free agents like Josh Howard, Mike Miller, Shaun Livingston, and James Singleton.

In order to answer this question, I will need to know which of those four free agents listed above that we might attempt to resign do we have Bird rights to, and what their respective cap holds will be.  I think question #30 should answer the 2nd question after the first question is resolved, but I'm still a little concerned by the ramifications.  For example, if we have Bird rights to Mike Miller, does it really mean that his cap hold will be $13.5 million (150% of his $9 million salary) unless we renounce him?  How does this make any sense?

In any case, I factor that we will have at least $18,205,596 in cap space going into the offseason, only counting the 6 players we have under contract and the 3 draft pick slotted salaries using the best case scenario of us getting the #1 pick overall (John Wall's salary).  That seems like enough to get a top-flight free agent, but it completely disappears if we have major dollar cap holds for Josh Howard and Mike Miller.  So if what I'm reading is true, we can either grab a top-flight free agent, or resign Mike Miller and/or Josh Howard and/or Shaun Livingston and/or James Singleton, but we cannot do both. In fact, if we sign a top-flight free agent, I think it will leave us only enough room to sign either Livingston or Singleton, but not both and certainly not either Miller or Howard.