Bucks Acquire Jared Dudley

4:11pm: The deal is official, the Bucks announced. It’s Dudley and a 2017 first-rounder to the Bucks and Delfino, Raduljica and the Clippers’ own 2015 second-round pick, which Milwaukee acquired in a previous trade, going to the Clippers.

NBA: Los Angeles Clippers at Minnesota Timberwolves3:41pm: The 2017 first-round pick going from the Clippers to the Bucks will be lottery protected, a source indicates to Charles F. Gardner of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Twitter link).

3:07pm: Delfino is only expected to miss part of the coming season, as Wojnarowski writes in his full story after deleting the tweet that indicated Delfino would likely miss the entire season.

2:33pm: The first-rounder headed Milwaukee’s way is a protected 2017 selection, according to Marc Stein of ESPN.com (on Twitter).

2:20pm: The Clippers will also receive their own 2015 second-round pick that Milwaukee had acquired through a previous trade, reports Sam Amick of USA Today (Twitter link).

1:59pm: The Clippers are sending Jared Dudley to the Bucks, tweets Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports. Carlos Delfino, Miroslav Raduljica head to L.A. while the Clippers also send Milwaukee a future first-round pick, Wojnarowski adds in a second tweet. Delfino, who missed all of last season because of injury, is likely to be out all of this year, too, according to Wojnarowski, making this trade purely about unloading Dudley’s salary from the Clippers’ perspective (Twitter link). Dudley is set to make $4.25MM this season and has an early termination option for the final season of his contract in 2015/16, which is also for $4.25MM.

Delfino originally hurt his right foot while with the Rockets in the 2013 playoffs, and while he signed a three-year, $9.75MM contract last summer with Milwaukee, he’ll never have taken the floor for the club while on that deal. The final season is non-guaranteed, so given L.A.’s apparent motivation to offload salary in the deal, it appears there’s a strong chance that Delfino will end up never having played at all under his contract.

Raduljica will make $1.5MM this season, but his salary for slightly more than that in 2015/16 is non-guaranteed, so the Clippers can cut ties with both he and Delfino next summer and pocket the savings. There was no guarantee that Dudley would have opted in, but the deal gives them greater cost control.

The move is a net gain in salary of $500K for the Clippers this year, moving them less than $1MM beneath their hard cap. The Clippers will end up with 13 players as a result of the transaction, so they won’t have to sign anyone else to meet the regular season roster minimum. The deal will leave the team with $649,228 to spend under the hard cap, according to the figures compiled by Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders, so that leaves only room for a prorated contract later in the season.

The Bucks had been carrying 15 guaranteed contracts plus two non-guaranteed deals, one of which is for Kendall Marshall, who’ll probably be part of the team’s rotation. So, the trade will allow the team to keep Marshall without having to unload a fully guaranteed contract.

Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.

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