The Heat have officially issued a qualifying offer to forward Caleb Martin, making him a restricted free agent, tweets Ira Winderman of The South Florida Sun Sentinel.
A qualifying offer is essentially a one-year contract offer that a team must make to a player eligible for restricted free agency if it wants to avoid him becoming unrestricted. The QO can be accepted by the player, but it’s often just a placeholder, giving his current team the right of first refusal in the event that he signs an offer sheet with a new team.
After spending his first two NBA seasons in Charlotte, Martin was waived by the Hornets last August, then signed a two-way contract with Miami, where he outperformed that two-way deal and was converted to a standard contract. In 60 games (22.9 MPG) for the Heat, the 26-year-old averaged 9.2 points, 3.8 rebounds, and 1.0 steal on .507/.413/.763 shooting.
Martin’s qualifying offer will be worth his minimum salary plus $200K. Based on a $122MM salary cap, a player with three years of NBA experience projects to have a minimum salary of $1,876,674 in 2022/23, so his QO would be worth $2,076,674. That number will be adjusted slightly upward or downward if the cap doesn’t come in at exactly $122MM.
Because the Heat only hold Martin’s Non-Bird rights, it may be a challenge for them to make him a competitive offer if he draws serious interest on the open market. If they want to give Martin a starting salary higher than about $2.25MM, the Heat will have to dip into their mid-level exception to do so.
Martin is the No. 31 player on our list of 2022’s top 50 free agents.
Need to keep Caleb Martin, especially if PJ Tucker leaves as a free agent….