Lakers To Pay Hefty Luxury Tax

VIA: When the NBA formally announced its salary cap and luxury-tax threshold for 2013-2014, six teams were also formally handed the ball for the tax payments they owe the league for last season's payrolls.

And the heftiest, not surprisingly, belongs to the Los Angeles Lakers.

he Lakers, according to official league figures obtained by ESPN.com, will be forced to pay $29,259,739 in luxury tax for a team that -- thanks to a steady stream of injuries and L.A.'s well-chronicled chemistry problems that ultimately led to Dwight Howard's defection in free agency -- barely squeaked into the playoffs and will go down as one of the biggest underachievers in league history.

The figures distributed late Tuesday to the league's 30 teams reveal only five other teams facing tax bills for the 2012-13 payrolls: Miami ($13,346,242), Brooklyn ($12,883,647), New York ($9,962,406), Chicago ($3,932,336) and Boston ($1,181,640).

Luxury-tax penalties in the NBA will be much steeper starting with the coming season, which ushers in a more punitive scale for roster excess than seen during the first two seasons of the NBA's labor agreement introduced in December 2011.

The Nets, for example, are projected at this early juncture to have a tax bill in the $75 million range despite carrying a similar overall payroll (roughly $100 million) to what the Lakers did in 2012-13.

The tax amounts for last season were based on a dollar-for-dollar tax above the per-team threshold of $70.307 million.

Fifty percent of the total tax of $70,566,010 paid by the six teams above, according to the 2011 labor agreement, will be used to fund revenue sharing for the 2012-13 season. The remaining 50 percent will be distributed in equal shares to each non-taxpaying team.

Sources told ESPN.com that each non-taxpaying team will thus receive 1/24th of $35,283,005, which computes to $1,470,125 per team.

The six taxpaying teams, sources say, will receive an invoice by Monday and must remit their required payment by July 24. Escrow and tax distributions are scheduled to be made back to teams no later than July 29.