Salary-cap spike will give Knicks two bites — Nets one — at Apple

Any lingering chance of the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association coming to an agreement on a way to avoid a massive salary-cap spike for the 201617 season ended Wednesday when the league announced the union had rejected the NBA’s proposal to “smooth” in the flood of money that is set to pour into the sport.

Now the salary cap — which for this season is a little more than $63 million and is expected to be roughly $67 million next season — will be roughly $90 million for 2016-17, which will benefit both the Knicks and Nets.

The local teams, of course, will not be the only ones to benefit from the massive jump in the cap that summer, which Phil Jackson alluded to Thursday.

“It’s not about who will have the most money anymore,” Jackson said. “That playing field pretty much has evened out, especially with the money coming into the league.”

Still, while plenty of teams will have cap space that summer, most marquee free agents aren’t likely to choose the likes of Milwaukee or Minnesota over New York when the money is even.

So how will the salarycap spike specifically help the local teams? Let’s start with the Knicks, who have spent the past year in a holding pattern waiting for free agency this summer, when they’re set to have a little more than $30 million in cap space for Jackson to use in the hopes of retooling the team around Carmelo Anthony and become contenders next season.

Typically, teams get one shot to jump with both feet into free agency, and then have the team that they have for the next few seasons because the salary cap rises only by a few million dollars each year — if it jumps at all.

So teams that have spent to the cap over the past few seasons only would be able to create cap room by either trading away players with big, long-term contracts or by signing guys to shorter — and, from a player’s perspective, often less desirable — deals.

For the Knicks, however, that won’t be a problem. This summer, they’ll be able to go

after every one of their top targets and spend right to the cap to try to make their team as good as possible next season. Then, because the cap is going to jump more than $20 million to the $90 million range for the 2016-17 season, the Knicks will have another shot at acquiring a star-level player that summer, when Kevin Durant headlines a star-studded free-agent class.

It will be an incredibly rare chance for a team to doubledip at the top of the class in free agency, and one the Knicks hope finally will be able to get them back on track after a disastrous 2014-15.

The Nets, on the other hand, find themselves in a very different situation. While they haven’t fallen to anywhere near the same depths as the Knicks, they won’t have the same chance to retool their roster this summer because they still have several players signed to big-money contracts through next season.

When the cap spikes in July 2016, however, the Nets will be primed to take advantage, as they’re projected to have somewhere close to $60 million in cap space that summer to remake their ros- ter through free agency for the first time since moving to Brooklyn in 2012.

That will allow the Nets to target not just one or two marquee players, like most teams do when they get into free agency, but three or four — giving them the chance to potentially remake their entire roster in one summer. Given the Nets don’t have control over their firstround pick until 2019, it will likely be their best chance to add high-impact players between now and then.