The match tells you if it is allowed. The delta tells you if it is smart.
Salary matching is a gate, not a grade. Two teams can build a trade that clears the match and it can still be a giveaway for one side. Every other trade machine stops there. This one keeps going: it reads each team's cap state, enforces the apron rules, and then tells you the one thing the match never does, whether the players you got actually improve your team. Legality is the gate. The Team KR delta is the grade.
A trade can be perfectly legal and a total giveaway.
The salary match asks one question: do the numbers line up. It does not ask whether the deal makes you better. The engine runs both at once. Here is a composite trade that clears the match cleanly, and is a giveaway anyway.
The salaries matched to the dollar, so a machine that stops at legality calls this a valid trade and moves on. The engine keeps reading: it is a valid trade and a bad one for Team A. Legal and smart are not the same word.
Illustrative engine read on the real legality-plus-delta structure. Composite teams and players, demonstration figures.
The same framework is legal for one team and forbidden for another.
Cap rules do not just price a trade, they decide whether it can exist. Above the second apron a team cannot aggregate salaries, cannot take back more than it sends, cannot include cash, and its future picks freeze. The same deal that works below the line is stopped cold above it.
This is the half of the game the value read never reaches, and the half most tools get wrong. A deal is not good or bad until it is first legal, and above the second apron the rules erase whole categories of trade. The engine enforces the CBA state by state, so you never spend a week building a trade the league will not let you make. The apron is a wall, not a tax.
Illustrative engine read on the real apron and CBA-legality structure (aggregation, matching, frozen picks). Generic team situations, demonstration figures.
A great trade solves a different bottleneck for each team.
The best deals are not zero-sum. Before it grades value, the engine diagnoses each side's real bottleneck, then reads whether the trade solves it, and prices any picks as bets with a size, not as a flat sum of ratings. Here both teams get better, because they needed opposite things.
A rating-sum would call this close to even and miss the point. The engine sees a contender buying its playoff creator and a rebuild buying youth and picks, each solving the exact problem the other could not use its own assets to fix. Both deltas are positive, because the trade was built on the diagnosis, not the swap.
Illustrative engine read on the real both-sides diagnosis and pick-as-bet structure. Composite teams, demonstration figures.
A trade machine that stops at the salary match is answering the easy half of the question and calling it done. Legality is table stakes: the numbers matching, the apron rules, the frozen picks, the categories the CBA erases. The engine clears that gate and then does the part that matters, reads the deal through each team's Team KR, checks whether it solves each side's diagnosed bottleneck, and prices the picks as bets with a size. A valid trade and a good trade are not the same thing, and knowing the difference is the whole job.
Clear the gate. Then read the grade.
Trades enforces the CBA, then reads the deal through each team and its diagnosed need.