Raptors Sign Lucas Nogueira
SUNDAY: The signing is now official, the team announced via press release.
TUESDAY: The Raptors and Lucas Nogueira will buy out his contract with Estudiantes of Spain, as Javier Maestro of Encestando.es reports (translation via Emiliano Carchia of Sportando). Toronto is expected to pay most of the roughly $800K the NBA release clause requires. The maximum Toronto is allowed to pay is $600K, and Nogueira will cover the rest.
The Raptors acquired the rights to Nogueira, the No. 16 pick from the 2013 draft, in a trade with the Hawks last month. Toronto was known to be planning on bringing the Brazilian big man to the NBA this season. He will still be bound by the rookie scale, so his salary will likely start at over $1.75MM.
Nogueira, a center, is expected to join forward Bruno Caboclo as Brazilian additions to the Raptors this season, but Nogueira likely has a clearer path to playing time than Caboclo, the 20th overall selection from this year’s draft. The 7’0″ Nogueira will join a roster featuring only a single true center in Jonas Valanciunas, and Toronto is also open to dealing away forward/center combo Chuck Hayes.
Raptors Sign Will Cherry
SUNDAY: The signing is official, the team has announced via press release. The exact terms were not disclosed.
WEDNESDAY: The Raptors have agreed in principle to sign Will Cherry to a two-year minimum deal, reports Marc J. Spears of Yahoo! Sports (Twitter link). It had been previously reported that both Toronto and the Cavaliers were interested in the guard’s services. Cherry went undrafted out of Montana in 2013, and he wasn’t in an NBA training camp last fall.
The 6’1″ 23-year-old averaged 12.8 PPG and 4.0 RPG while logging 25.3 minutes per contest in five games for the Cavs Summer League team in Las Vegas. Cherry also played for the Cavs’ D-League affiliate last season, when he provided 11.6 PPG, 3.7 RPG, and 4.5 APG in 30.4 MPG.
The Raptors currently have 13 guaranteed contracts on their roster and Cherry will provide depth in the backcourt, primarily behind Kyle Lowry and Greivis Vasquez at the point guard position.
Jazz To Keep Ian Clark
The Jazz will guarantee the 2014/15 contract of second year shooting guard Ian Clark, reports Jody Genessy of the Deseret News. GM Dennis Lindsey indicated earlier today that the team would address the contract situation of the Belmont product, who signed a two-year deal with the Jazz last July that wasn’t guaranteed for the upcoming season. Aaron Falk of the Salt Lake Tribune confirms Genessy’s report (via Twitter). Clark’s salary was set to become fully guaranteed for $816,482 if he wasn’t waived by the end of today, as shown in our schedule of contract guarantee dates.
The Bill Duffy client played in 23 games for the Jazz in his rookie season, averaging three points in 7.5 minutes per game. Clark shuttled between Utah and the D-League for much of the year, where he averaged 12.4 points and 5.6 assists in eight games for the Bakersfield Jam. While he’s only 23, Clark’s minutes figure to remain limited with the Jazz due to a crowded backcourt that already includes Dante Exum, Trey Burke, Gordon Hayward and Alec Burks.
As Genessy reminds us, the Jazz now have 13 players on guaranteed deals entering this season and speculates that they could add one more. In addition to adding Exum and Rodney Hood in the draft, Utah has traded for Steve Novak and signed Trevor Booker this summer. Their most significant move, of course, was retaining highly sought after Hayward, who was a restricted free agent.
Knicks Sign Cleanthony Early
The Knicks have signed Cleanthony Early, this year’s 34th overall pick, the team announced (on Twitter). It’ll have to be a minimum-salary arrangement, since the Knicks are well over the cap and have no exceptions other than the minimum-salary exception to use. That exception limits the contract to no more than two years, though it’s not immediately clear whether Early is getting two years or just one.
The small forward from Wichita State is one of three second-round picks from last month whose rights belong to the Knicks, though it’s unclear whether the team intends to sign 51st overall selection Thanasis Antetokounmpo or No. 57 pick Louis Labeyrie this year. Early is the 15th player on the Knicks roster, one that had included only a dozen guaranteed contracts.
Early went just about where he had been expected to go on draft night, as Chad Ford of ESPN.com ranked him as the 32nd best prospect while Jonathan Givony of DraftExpress rated him 38th. The final version of Alex Lee’s Hoops Rumors Mock Draft had Early slipping into the first round at No. 27. Concerns about the 23-year-old’s age and worries about whether he fits into the position of small forward in the NBA surrounded him, as Lee wrote when he examined Early’s prospect profile, but he’s also a polished player capable who shouldn’t require much development.
Spurs Sign Tony Parker To Extension
1:49pm: Wojnarowski, in his full story, pegs the value of the three-year extension at nearly $45MM, so it appears as though Parker is getting the max of $43,335,938.
1:21pm: The extension covers three seasons, reports Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports (Twitter link). That takes it through 2017/18.
12:55pm: The Spurs have signed Tony Parker to a multiyear extension, the team announced via press release. It’s the third extension that Parker has signed with San Antonio over the course of his career. He’s set to make $12.5MM this year in the final season under the terms of his most recent extension. It’s not immediately clear just how long or lucrative Parker’s latest deal is.
There’d been no public talk that the extension had been in the works, as is typical with the San Antonio organization. The news of Gregg Popovich‘s extension earlier this month was similarly sudden. Still, the notion that Parker intends to stick around the Spurs for a while longer is certainly no shock, and the same was the case with Popovich. Parker has been confident that he would remain in San Antonio and told close associates that he had no desire to relocate his family, tweets Jabari Young of the San Antonio Express-News.
Parker’s salary for this season had been only partially guaranteed for $3.5MM, according to Mark Deeks of ShamSports, but as expected the Spurs kept him past June 30th, when the salary became fully guaranteed. The maximum value of an extension that the Creative Artists Agency client could have signed would be $43,335,938 over three years, as Deeks points out via Twitter. That’s much less than Parker could have received if he signed a new contract as a free agent next summer. Just how much a new contract could have given him won’t be known until the NBA sets its maximum salaries next summer, but based on this year’s max for a player of Parker’s experience, he likely would have been eligible for five years and much more than $100MM.
That helps explain why most veterans don’t sign extensions, but Parker and his Spurs teammates have a long history of hometown discounts. Parker lowered his annual pay with his last extension instead of going for the significant raises for which he was eligible.
The 32-year-old point guard is the youngest of a star trio also composed of Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili, but even Parker is beginning to advance out of his prime years. He, like the other Spurs mainstays, remains a strong producer, even though his 29.4 minutes per game this season were his fewest since he was a rookie. He averaged 16.7 points and 5.7 assists this past year, another All-Star season that culminated in San Antonio’s fifth championship in franchise history and fourth with Parker in tow.
Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.
Heat Sign Shawne Williams
The Heat have signed forward Shawne Williams, the team announced. Miami is limited to shelling out only the minimum salary, but it’s not clear how long the deal is for or whether the salary for the former 17th overall pick is guaranteed.
Williams spent 36 games with the Lakers last season, most of them coming while he was on a non-guaranteed deal at the start the season. The team cut him loose just before the deal was to become fully guaranteed and re-signed him to a 10-day contract after he spent time in the D-League. He was out of the NBA during the 2012/13 season, and he’s more than three years removed from his most productive campaign, when he averaged 7.1 points in 20.7 minutes per game and shot 40.1% from behind the three-point arc for the 2010/11 Knicks. The career 33.3% three-point shooter hasn’t been able to duplicate that sort of marksmanship since.
The Heat had been carrying only 10 guaranteed contracts and 12 players total, so the signing helps them bolster their roster, and Williams appears to have a strong chance to make it to opening-night. The 28-year-old is a client of Relativity Sports agent Happy Walters, as our Agency Database shows.
Nuggets Sign Erick Green
AUGUST 1ST: The deal is official, the team announced.
JULY 26TH, 7:51pm: Green’s three-year contract is non-guaranteed, as detailed on Basketball Insiders’ Eric Pincus’ salary sheet for the Nuggets, coming in at $2,332,826 of total salary.
FRIDAY, 7:55am: Green signed his contract with the Nuggets on Thursday, according to the RealGM transactions log, though the team has yet to announce the deal.
THURSDAY, 2:20pm: It’ll be a three-year deal for Green, the 46th pick in last year’s draft, as Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports tweets. That means Denver will use a portion of its mid-level exception to complete the signing.
WEDNESDAY, 8:06pm: After a strong summer league showing, Erick Green will sign a multi-year deal with the Nuggets, reports Nikos Varlas of Eurohoops (hat tip to Sportando). The Virginia Tech product played for Italy’s Mens Sana Siena last season after being selected by Utah in the second round of the 2013 NBA Draft (his rights were then traded to Denver). Green averaged 11.5 points on 51 percent shooting in 28 games for Siena last season, helping to lead the team to the seventh game of the Italian finals.
Christopher Dempsey of the Denver Post confirms the deal, writing that Green will likely fill the team’s need for a third point guard behind Ty Lawson and Nate Robinson. As Dempsey notes, Green averaged 16.6 points, 3.0 boards and 2.6 assists per game for the Nuggets this summer, in turn convincing the team that he was capable of handling point guard duties in the NBA. His scoring ability was likely never in doubt, as the 23-year-old was the leading scorer among Division I players in his final season in Blacksburg.
The financial terms of the deal are not yet known, though the original report indicates that the pact will extend beyond one year. After adding Gary Harris in the draft and Arron Afflalo via trade, the signing of Green currently puts the Nuggets’ roster at 14 players. Denver also selected international prospects Jusuf Nurkic and Nikola Jokic in June, though it is unclear if either will play for the team this season.
Bucks Sign Johnny O’Bryant
THURSDAY, 5:35pm: The final year of O’Bryant’s contract is actually non-guaranteed salary, rather than a team option, tweets Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders.
6:40pm: O’Bryant’s deal is for three years, with the third year being a team option, reports Charles F. Gardner of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
WEDNESDAY, 5:02pm: The Bucks have signed Johnny O’Bryant, the 36th pick in this year’s draft, the team announced. Exact terms of the contract were not announced. He’ll compete for playing time with Ersan Ilyasova and John Henson, though O’Bryant seems destined to spend significant time in the NBA D-League this season to help him develop.
The 6’9″ power forward had appeared in five games for the Bucks during Summer League play in Las Vegas, where he averaged 8.2 points and 5.4 rebounds in 18.2 minutes per contest. He saved his best game for last, when he posted 10 points and 10 rebounds against the Warriors Summer League entry.
O’Bryant played for three seasons at LSU, where he averaged 12.7 PPG, 7.7 RPG, and 1.3 APG for his career. He earned First Team All-SEC honors in 2013 and 2014.
Nuggets Sign Jusuf Nurkic
JULY 31ST: The signing is official, the Nuggets announced.
JULY 23RD: The Nuggets have signed 16th overall pick Jusuf Nurkic, reports Mark Deeks of ShamSports (via Twitter). Nurkic will likely be making more than $1.7MM this season, as our table of salaries for 2014 first-round picks shows.
Denver’s other first rounder, Gary Harris, signed his deal with the team earlier this month. However the situation with Nurkic, a 19-year-old international prospect from Bosnia, was less clear as his addition to the Nuggets roster faced the obstacle of a $1.77MM buyout due to his overseas club. Eventually, Nurkic and KK Cedevita (of Croatia) agreed to spread the buyout over two seasons. With Denver paying the $600K Excluded International Player Payment Amount this upcoming season, that would put Nurkic on the hook for about $285K in 2014/15 and the full $885K in 2015/16, meaning he will pocket roughly $1.42MM in his first season in the NBA.
At 6-foot-11 and 280 pounds, Nurkic is a traditional center that rocketed up draft boards due to his size and touch around the basket. As Denver GM Tim Connelly indicated after the draft, the Bosnian is a “long term play” although he does possess the skill level that could allow him to have an impact sooner than some think.
Nuggets Sign Gary Harris
JULY 31ST: The team has followed up with a formal announcement, making the signing official.
JULY 9TH: The Nuggets have signed 19th overall pick Gary Harris, according to Aaron J. Lopez of Nuggets.com (Twitter link). Harris will likely be making a little more than $1.5MM this season, as our table of salaries for 2014 first-round picks shows.
Denver’s other first-round pick, 16th overall selection Jusuf Nurkic, is reportedly working on a buyout from his overseas club and remains unsigned, though the latest report indicates that he’s likely to join the Nuggets this year. Both came via trade from the Bulls in a deal in which the Nuggets surrendered the rights to No. 11 pick Doug McDermott.
Harris, a 6’4″ shooting guard, averaged 16.7 points in 32.3 minutes per game this past season, with 35.2% shooting from behind the three-point line. Eddie Scarito of Hoops Rumors, who examined the prospect profile of Harris, cast the former Michigan State Spartan as a strong value for teams picking 10th through 15th, suggesting that he’s a steal for the Nuggets at No. 19.