What is the difference between a soft salary cap and a hard salary cap?
Unlike the NFL and NHL, the NBA features a so-called "soft" cap,
meaning that there are several significant exceptions that allow
teams to exceed the salary cap to sign players. This is done to
allow teams to keep their own players, which, in theory, fosters
fan support in each individual city. By contrast, the NFL and NHL
caps are considered "hard," meaning that they offer relatively few
(if any) circumstances in which teams can exceed the salary
cap.