Front Office Originals

We're not quite at the one-quarter mark of the 2025/26 NBA season, but several of the investments that clubs made in free agents over the summer are already paying off in a major way.

Only three free agents got more overall guaranteed money this past offseason than the $100MM Josh Giddey received on his new four-year deal with the Bulls, but Giddey is putting up All-Star caliber numbers in Chicago, making that $100MM commitment look like a potential bargain for his team.

Similarly, Clippers guard James Harden didn't come cheap in free agency -- he's earning $39.2MM in the first season of his new two-year contract. But Harden is playing even better than he did when he earned All-NBA honors last season and is one of the only reasons the struggling Clippers have been competitive at all. The team is getting outscored by an ugly 13.6 points per 100 possessions when he's not on the court. Even at nearly $40MM, Harden has outplayed his salary so far.

While Giddey and Harden are among the well-paid free agents making good on their new deals, we're focusing today on a group of players who flew more under the radar over the summer, having signed for the veteran's minimum or something close to it. It wasn't major news when these five players agreed to terms with their respective teams, but they're well on their way to securing more lucrative paydays when their current deals expire.

Let's dive in...

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As we outline in greater detail in our breakdown of 2026's traded first-round picks, a series of convoluted conditions - including swap rights and protections - make it impossible in many cases to tell this early in the season exactly which first-rounders will end up being sent to which teams.

However, based on the on-court results from the first month-plus of the 2025/26 season, we're starting to get a clearer sense of where teams might land in the standings, which in turn gives us a better idea of which of those traded picks will change hands, which teams will receive them, and which ones will be the most valuable.

With the caveat that plenty could change between now and next May's draft lottery, we're taking a closer look today at which of 2026's traded first-round picks are emerging as high-level assets and which ones are more likely to fall toward the end of the first round or not change hands at all.

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There are currently 53 entries on our list of traded player exceptions available to teams around the league. The vast majority of those exceptions - which allow a team to take on a certain amount of salary without sending out equivalent matching salary - won't expire until after the 2026 trade deadline, but the majority of them will also expire without being used.

In many cases, it's impractical for a team to use a trade exception. The exception might be too small to be legitimately useful, or the team might not be in position to add more salary to its books due to its position relative to the luxury tax line or the tax aprons.

In some instances, the best a team can do with an exception is to roll it over for another year. For instance, if a club holds a $10MM trade exception and ends up swapping one $10MM player for another, it could use the exception to acquire the new player, creating a new $10MM TPE for the outgoing player.

However, there are a handful of trade exceptions across the league that could be genuinely valuable at this year's trade deadline, allowing teams to absorb salary without sending out any themselves. We're taking a closer look in the space below at those exceptions, which will be worth monitoring in the coming months.

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When ESPN's Shams Charania broke the news in September that Cam Thomas had accepted his qualifying offer from Brooklyn, he noted within his report that the Nets guard should be better positioned in free agency next summer -- not just because he'll be unrestricted, but because there are "at least 10 teams are set to have cap space."

While it's true that unrestricted free agency should be more favorable to navigate for Thomas than restricted free agency was, it feels premature to assume that there will be double-digit teams with cap room next offseason.

For one, some of the teams projected to operate under the cap in 2026 could make in-season trades that add salary to their books for next season and beyond. Additionally, even if those clubs don't take on any future salary in the coming months, they may not end up having cap room available, depending on what happens with their own free agents.

In the space below, we're taking a closer early look at the teams best positioned to have cap room in 2026 and weighing how realistic it is that they'll take that path.

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