Houston Rockets Team Payroll 2019-20 $120.5 million The constrained exceptions are where the only actual hard cap in the CBA comes in. In order to stop teams from utilizing a non-taxpayer exception and then going into the tax, the CBA says if you use a non-taxpayer exception then you have a hard cap placed on your spending in that year: you cannot go over an apron, a certain point roughly $6M above the tax. https://www.basketball-reference.com/contracts/HOU.html
I am curious to see whether Morey will look to use the non Taxpayer MLE this summer, or stick with the smaller MLE to retain flexibility. Not clear to me how close they can get to the apron anyway.