Tim Bontemps: In past years, teams like Indiana and San Antonio have gone into the regular season with tens of millions of salary cap space sitting and unused. Because teams only had to eventually get to the salary cap floor at some point during the season — and, if they didn’t, the only “penalty” was cutting a check to the players on their roster — there was no need to spend money teams didn’t want to. Now, though, the rules are far different. Fail to reach the salary floor by the start of the regular season and the money teams receive in luxury tax payments is impacted. Therefore, we saw all of the cap space teams this summer make aggressive moves to take on money. Some of them, like Houston and Indiana, spent big on free agents. Utah took a flier on John Collins, a talented player in need of a change in scenery.