With no bad contracts on the books, I think you have to consider paying Hibbert unless we are confident we can draft our center of the future and have him develop fast enough. Especially with the salary cap set to grow, $15M is not crazy. Yeah, ideally he's worth $10M or whatever, but we can afford it. He's still young, elite defensively, and we don't have to ask him to do too much.
Then we could, for example, do a S&T for either Jimmy Butler or Kawhi Leonard - whichever team blinks in the face of a lot of draft picks coming back. Suppose we send Bradley and a pile of draft picks (3x 1st rounders?).
Believe it or not, we'd still have enough money to sign Dragic if we can unload Wallace with Green prior.
Smart ($3.4M)
Dragic ($15M)
Butler ($15M)
Sullinger ($2.3M)
Hibbert ($15M)
bench: Young ($1.7M), Olynyk ($2.2M), Zeller ($2.6M), Turner ($3.4M)
TOTAL: $60.6M
If afterwards we could make use of our $12.9M exception, we could go over the cap for someone like DeRozan (let's say Toronto knows he is gone after next year as a FA and we send them James Young and a pick).
Yeah yeah, a million unlikely ifs, but how fun is this squad?
Smart
Dragic / DeRozan
Butler / DeRozan
Sullinger / KO
Hibbert / Zeller