The Orlando Magic enter the offseason with a new head coach after firing Jamahl Mosley and hiring Sean Sweeney, and the franchise has other issues it must address.

Beyond hiring a new head coach, the most important obstacle for the front office to deal with is the roster and the financial restrictions that come with it. According to Spotrac, the Magic are roughly $9.3 million over the first apron and roughly $3.6 million below the second apron. 

These categorizations come with different restrictions for teams that meet them, and Keith Smith of Spotrac recently joined The Sixth Man Show to discuss what the apron designations mean and how they affect the Magic.

"Yeah, the apron system was – it's really a balancer," Smith said. "It was to make sure that we didn't have, let's say, a third of the league paying – there was no financial penalty that they wouldn't pay. They had instituted the luxury tax a couple decades ago. And some teams, Golden State, the Clippers, the Nets were headed in that direction.

"They were just blown by that tax line because it meant nothing to them," Smith added. "Steve Ballmer paid the tax bill with the money he finds in his couch cushions; no issue for him,

Just off he went. So the NBA and the owners as a whole agreed, even some of the ones who were really expensive, we got to have some limits put on the high end. But what often gets missed in this system, I think, is I think a lot of people have a pretty good understanding of it can't just be super expensive anymore."

By falling above the first apron, Orlando is dealt a host of restrictions that include, but are not limited to, acquiring a player via sign-and-trade, using any portion of the non-taxpayer mid-level exception to acquire a player via trade or waiver claim and using more than the taxpayer portion of the mid-level exception to sign a player.

"They put in that first apron as a pseudo hard cap for teams," Smith said. "Then in the current CBA, they introduced the second apron. And that second apron is even more of a hard cap to teams or just a deterrent.

"If you're that expensive, there's a lot of things," he added. "One, strictly basketball wise, you can't do it. It's harder to make trades."

The Magic's core of Paolo Banchero, Franz Wagner, Desmond Bane and Jalen Suggs is stable for the time being, but the future of other players must be considered if Orlando wants to make any roster changes at all.

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