Rockets To Part Ways With Robert Covington
3:46pm: Charania clarifies in a full story that the Rockets continue to listen to trade proposals from other teams about Covington. Still, the team has decided to cut ties with him one way or another, Charania explains.
2:50pm: The Rockets will waive small forward Robert Covington, reports Shams Charania of RealGM (Twitter link). Other teams around the league have expressed interest in trading for the one-year veteran, but Houston is pushing ahead with its plan to simply release him, according to Charania. The 23-year-old had a $150K partial guarantee on his contract, so that money will remain on Houston’s books for the season unless another team submits a waiver claim. The move will leave the Rockets at 19 players, one shy of the preseason roster limit.
Covington spent the lion’s share of last season with Houston’s D-League affiliate, even though he was on the team’s NBA roster all year. He didn’t make his regular season debut for the Rockets until January 18th, and he saw just 34 total minutes all season, spread over seven games. He spent enough time in the D-League to earn an All-Star nod on that circuit, and averaged 23.2 points and 9.2 rebounds in 34.1 minutes per game across 42 D-League appearances.
Houston still faces a roster logjam with 15 fully guaranteed contracts, partial guarantees to Tarik Black and Akil Mitchell, and a non-guaranteed contract with starting point guard Patrick Beverley. Last week, I examined the tough decisions ahead for GM Daryl Morey.
Jazz Waive Kevin Murphy, Dee Bost
The Jazz have waived swingman Kevin Murphy and point guard Dee Bost, the team announced. The moves mean Utah will be stuck with $130K of dead money on its cap this season unless another team claims one of the players off waivers, since Bost and Murphy had identical $65K partial guarantees on the deals they signed this summer. Their departures leave the Jazz with 17 players on their roster.
Murphy, 24, appeared for five minutes in Tuesday’s preseason opener against the Blazers, scoring four points, but that’s the only action that either has seen in the team’s two exhibition games so far. It was Murphy’s second stint with Utah, which drafted him 47th overall in 2012 and gave him brief regular season playing time in his rookie season before shipping him to the Warriors in a three-team trade during the summer of 2013. Golden State waived him shortly thereafter, and he spent last season playing in France and for the Blazers D-League affiliate.
Bost, who turns 25 on Sunday, also has a Blazers connection, having spent training camp with Portland last autumn. Bost has made stops in Venezuela and Montenegro, and he, like Murphy, spent time last year with Portland’s D-League affiliate, the Idaho Stampede, who’ve switched their one-to-one affiliation to the Jazz for this season. The Jazz signed both with the idea that they’d end up playing for Idaho again this year, tweets Jody Genessy of the Deseret News, so it seems likely that Utah will retain the D-League rights to the pair.
The Jazz have 13 fully guaranteed contracts, plus two remaining partial guarantees on the books with Toure’ Murry and Jack Cooley. Brock Motum and veteran Dahntay Jones are without guaranteed salary.
Pelicans Waive Vernon Macklin
FRIDAY, 8:03am: The move is official, the team announced.
THURSDAY, 7:10pm: The Pelicans have indeed placed Macklin on waivers, according to the RealGM transactions log, though the team has yet to make an official announcement.
5:01pm: The Pelicans are waiving Vernon Macklin, Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders reports (Twitter link). Macklin was in training camp on a minimum salary, non-guaranteed deal. This move will leave New Orleans with 18 players on their preseason roster, with 12 players’ contracts being fully guaranteed, and three others possessing partial guarantees.
Macklin faced tough competition trying to secure a regular season roster spot in a crowded Pelicans frontcourt. He was competing for backup minutes with Patric Young, Luke Babbitt, and Darius Miller. Young has a much higher upside than Macklin, and has been showing flashes of talent during training camp, which could have led to the Pelicans deeming Macklin expendable.
The 27-year-old big man out of Florida played in the summer league with the Magic this year, averaging 5.4 PPG and 3.6 RPG in 15.6 minutes per contest. He saw just 5.9 minutes per game in 30 contests during the 2011/12 season with the Pistons, who selected him 52nd overall in 2011.
Michael Beasley Leaves Grizzlies For China
4:29pm: Memphis has officially waived Beasley, the team announced in a press release.
4:10pm: The Grizzlies reported that Beasley has been ill recently, making it difficult for him to contend for the final regular season roster spot, Ira Winderman of The Sun Sentinel notes. This information sheds some more light on why Beasley would decide to leave an NBA training camp to play overseas.
2:00pm: Beasley is receiving a “lucrative” one-year deal from the Sharks, Wojnarowski writes in his full story. Wojnarowski indicates that he’s already signed the contract, but the move can’t become official until the Grizzlies let him go and Beasley receives FIBA clearance.
1:30pm: Michael Beasley is leaving the Grizzlies and will sign to play in China, agent Jared Karnes tells Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports (Twitter link). He’s set to join the Yao Ming-owned Shanghai Sharks, Wojnarowski adds (on Twitter). Beasley is on a non-guaranteed contract with Memphis, but the team has yet to formally release him. The Grizzlies would have to be on board with the move for Beasley to depart, and the former No. 2 overall pick has the best track record of the six players on non-guaranteed deals that Memphis brought to camp. Memphis only has 14 guaranteed contracts, seemingly indicating that Beasley had a decent shot to make the opening-night roster.
Still, Grizzlies coach Dave Joerger said last month that the 25-year-old Beasley would have to “come in and take somebody’s spot,” suggesting that it wouldn’t necessarily be easy for him to remain on the roster into the regular season. The forward worked out for the Spurs and twice auditioned for Lakers brass, but it’s unclear if either club offered him a job. The Heat moved on from him after he spent last season with Miami, and while a report indicated the team had concerns about his maturity and his ability to play defense, Heat team president Pat Riley suggested there were no such issues.
Beasley was on a non-guaranteed contract this time last year with the Heat, but he stuck with the team for the entire season, averaging 7.9 points and 3.1 rebounds in 15.1 minutes per game. His 38.9% three-point shooting and 16.8 PER were his best marks in either category since his rookie season.
The terms of Beasley’s deal with Shanghai are unclear, but I’d imagine it involves some guaranteed salary, although that’s just my speculation. Most Chinese contracts involving NBA veterans cover one season without NBA escape clauses, but because the Chinese season ends much earlier than the NBA’s does, many players in Beasley’s position are able to latch on with NBA teams for the back stretch of the regular season and the playoffs.
Pacers Exercise 2015/16 Option On Solomon Hill
The Pacers have picked up their 2015/16 team option on their rookie scale contract with small forward Solomon Hill, the team announced. That means Hill, the 23rd overall pick in 2013, will make a guaranteed salary of approximately $1.359MM that season.
The move is no surprise given the expanded role that the 23-year-old Hill is likely to play for the Pacers this year. Key wing players Lance Stephenson and Evan Turner departed via free agency, and Paul George suffered a horrific broken leg that will likely keep him out for all of this season. Hill saw action in just 28 regular season games and appeared in the playoffs for only one minute this past season, but there’s a decent chance he’ll become a starter this year.
Indiana has about $36MM in commitments for next season now that the team has exercised Hill’s option, the only rookie scale option decision the team had to make before the October 31st deadline. No Pacers are up for rookie scale extensions this year, either, so the team is poised to have plenty of cap room to retool next summer.
Nuggets Sign Kenneth Faried To Extension
WEDNESDAY, 7:12pm: The deal is official, the team has announced. GM Tim Connelly said of Faried, “We value the energy and excitement that Kenneth brings night-in and night-out and we are thrilled to have reached an agreement on a contract extension. We are truly looking forward to watching Kenneth continue to grow as a player and leader for the Denver Nuggets.”
TUESDAY, 6:52pm: The deal contains incentives that could inflate the total value to $52MM over four years, reports Chris Dempsey of the Denver Post (via Twitter).
6:27pm: The deal has been reworked and will be a four-year, $50MM extension, reports Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports. The sticking point for the league, as Wojnarowski reported yesterday, was converting the pact from five years to four to comply with the provisions of the Designated Player rule that demand a player receives the maximum salary in the first year of an extension that covers five seasons. (Twitter links).
7:58am: The most likely outcome involves Faried ending up with a four-year, $48MM extension that runs through the 2018/19 season, perhaps with some incentive clauses that could lift the value of the deal, writes Chris Dempsey of The Denver Post.
MONDAY, 9:39am: The Nuggets are talking with the NBA about just how the extension can be structured under the rules, tweets Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports. Wojnarowski indicates that the original intention was to make it a five-year extension, but that it could wind up as a four-year deal. The Yahoo! scribe calls the collective bargaining agreement language that mandates the maximum salary in the first season of an extension for a Designated Player “ambiguous, at best.”
8:34am: The Nuggets and Kenneth Faried struck a deal Sunday night on a five-year, $60MM extension, reports Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports. It’s not entirely clear whether Wojnarowski means that the extension will cover five seasons by itself or the four years that follow this coming season. That’s because $60MM almost certainly wouldn’t be enough to cover the provisions of the Designated Player rule that would mandate that Faried receive the maximum salary in the first year of an extension that covers five seasons. In any case, the final season will be partially guaranteed, giving the Nuggets a chance to save $8MM that year in the seemingly unlikely event that they waive the power forward.
The Nuggets jumped into extension discussions with agent Thad Foucher in July, the earliest they could have come to a deal. It appears the conversation was slow-going, but according to Wojnarowski, the sides began to exchange “serious proposals” this week. Faried, who turns 25 next month, no doubt helped his cause with a breakout performance at the FIBA World Cup in late August and early September, when he averaged 12.4 points and 7.8 rebounds in just 21.5 minutes per game for Team USA. I wrote in late July that Faried seemed in line for a four-year, $44MM deal, and a GM told Sean Deveney of The Sporting News that he envisioned annual salaries below $10MM for Faried before the World Cup boosted his estimation into the range of Al Jefferson‘s $13.5MM yearly paydays.
The former No. 22 pick had already begun to change perceptions with his improvement last season. His name appeared in a handful of early-season trade rumors, and the Nuggets, worried that Foucher would seek $10MM+ annual salaries, reportedly brought him up in trade discussions at about this time last year. The “Manimal” convinced the Nuggets he was worth that kind of money, setting a career high with 13.7 PPG in 27.2 MPG in his third NBA season, a rate that extrapolates to 18.1 points per 36 minutes, the best mark of anyone on the team who played at least 1,000 total minutes. He also recorded a team-high 19.8 PER. Still, he’s not a strong defender, as Cray Allred of Hoops Rumors noted in August when he examined Faried as an extension candidate.
Nuggets GM Tim Connelly and Faried both expressed interest over the offseason in a long-term future with each other, so it’s not surprising to see the sides come to terms. Depending on how Faried’s $60MM will be spread, the Nuggets will have about $60MM in total salaries for 2015/16. Still, it’s possible that Denver will have cap room that exceeds the value of the largest mid-level exception next summer, particularly if the cap rises to $70MM, as some teams project.
Knicks Sign D.J. Mbenga
The Knicks have signed seven-year NBA veteran center D.J. Mbenga, the team announced (Twitter link). The team is limited to giving out only the minimum salary, but it’s unclear if any of it will be guaranteed for the 33-year-old who played under Knicks president Phil Jackson when he was coaching the Lakers. New York doesn’t have to let anyone go to make room, since the team had been carrying 18 players, two shy of the preseason roster limit of 20.
Mbenga hasn’t played an NBA regular season game since the 2010/11 season, but he was with the Mavs for the 2012/13 preseason. He spent the regular season that year playing in China and in the Philippines. The 7-footer’s greatest success came when he was with Jackson and averaged a career-high 2.7 points in 7.9 minutes per game for the title-winning 2008/09 Lakers. Mbenga has never seen more than 8.1 MPG in any NBA season.
The team made the signing with only training camp in mind, though it had been in the works for a while, tweets Marc Berman of the New York Post. There’s little opportunity for Mbenga or any of New York’s camp invitees to crack the 15-man regular season roster, since the team has 14 fully guaranteed deals and a partial guarantee with Samuel Dalembert, as I outlined Tuesday. Still, if the Knicks let him go and he’d like to play in the D-League, New York can retain his rights for its D-League affiliate.
Pacers Sign Frank Vogel To Extension
The Pacers have signed coach Frank Vogel to an extension, the team announced. The arrangement covers multiple seasons, but no other terms are immediately available. Vogel had been set to enter the final season of his existing deal.
The 41-year-old Vogel revealed last month that he and the team were in extension talks and said that he wanted to remain with the Pacers “forever.” It seemed an iffy proposition this spring that he would hold the job much longer, as Marc Stein of ESPN.com reported that the Pacers would dismiss him if the team performed poorly in the playoffs. GM Kevin Pritchard dismissed the notion, but Mark Jackson loomed as a potential replacement, as Stein wrote later. There even appeared to be an outside chance that president of basketball operations Larry Bird would oust Vogel and come down to the bench and coach in his place before the playoffs began. Bird nonetheless expressed confidence in Vogel during the final week of the regular season after making comments earlier in the season that seemed critical of Vogel’s coaching style.
Indiana reached the Eastern Conference Finals and took the Heat to six games before falling, nearly matching the team’s achievement the year before, when the Pacers extended the Heat to seven games in the same round. Still, the Pacers took a circuitous path back to that point, with a hot start to this past season and a disturbing post All-Star malaise. Indiana nonetheless held on to grab the top seed in the Eastern Conference playoffs, but the franchise suffered a pair of painful losses in the offseason. Lance Stephenson rejected a five-year, $45MM offer to re-sign and bolted for the Hornets, while Paul George broke his leg during a Team USA scrimmage, likely knocking him out for the season.
Vogel’s tenure as Pacers coach dates to the 2010/11 season, when he took over on an interim basis for the final 38 games of the regular season and secured the team’s first playoff bid in five years. The Pacers removed the interim tag the following summer, and the Pacers went a round deeper into the playoffs the next two seasons before plateauing this spring. Vogel has compiled a 167-100 record in the regular season and a 28-26 mark in the playoffs over the course of his time as Indiana’s head coach.
Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.
Jamaal Franklin Signs To Play In China
Former Grizzlies shooting guard Jamaal Franklin has signed a two-month deal with the Zhejiang Guangsha Lions of the Chinese Basketball Association, as he tells Mark Zeigler of The San Diego Union-Tribune. Chema de Lucas of Gigantes del Basket was the first to report that the 41st overall pick from 2013 was headed to China (Twitter link; translation via HoopsHype). Franklin will serve as a replacement for Jonathan Gibson, an injured Lions guard. It’s unclear just how much Franklin will make as part of the arrangement.
Franklin, 23, worked out for the Spurs shortly after the Grizzlies waived him at the end of August, and it appears as though he auditioned for the Wizards, too. The Brian Elfus client indicated to Zeigler that he had opportunities to join an NBA team for camp on a non-guaranteed deal but decided against doing so for financial reasons. Franklin saw limited action this past season with Memphis, racking up nearly three times as many total minutes on D-League assignment as he saw in the NBA. He averaged 1.9 points and 1.1 rebounds in 7.7 minutes per game across 21 NBA appearances. Still, he displayed a better long-range shooting stroke than he demonstrated in college at San Diego State, nailing 38.2% of his three-point attempts in the NBA and the D-League combined.
Memphis used the stretch provision to reduce Franklin’s guaranteed minimum salary for this season to just $163,296. Since the value of his Chinese deal is unknown, it’s not clear whether it’ll be enough to trigger the right of set-off to further reduce the amount the Grizzlies owe him.
Sixers Sign Lee, Gordon, Cut Bogans, Varnado
The Sixers have signed Malcolm Lee and Drew Gordon, and they waived Keith Bogans and Jarvis Varnado to make room on the 20-man preseason roster, the team announced (Twitter link). The team reportedly came to agreements with both Lee and Gordon prior to camp, but they were left off the team’s roster when training camp began. The dismissal of Varnado is somewhat surprising, since he had a $75K partial guarantee and the team had been carrying eight players with non-guaranteed contracts. Bogans was one of those eight, and his nearly $5.3MM salary was the largest by far, so it’s certainly not a shock to see Philadelphia part ways with him. The Sixers have plenty of capacity to exceed the minimum salary in their new arrangements with Lee and Gordon, but the terms aren’t immediately clear.
Lee was one of a handful of players to work out for the Lakers in late August, and he also worked out for the Nets earlier in the summer, though that audition seemed to be geared mostly toward summer league. The 24-year-old guard appeared in summer league with the Raptors, but the two-year NBA veteran will attempt to officially return to the league with the Sixers after sitting out 2013/14, in part because of injury. Gordon, a 24-year-old power forward, was with the Sixers in summer league after splitting this past season between Italy and Turkey. He also had a stop in Serbia after going undrafted out of New Mexico in 2012, and this will be his first NBA preseason experience.
Bogans joined the Sixers after a pair of trades brought him from the Celtics through Cleveland. He sat out much of last season as Celtics president of basketball operations Danny Ainge sought to use his sizable non-guaranteed deal in a trade. Varnado hooked on with both the Bulls and the Sixers via 10-day contracts last season, and Philadelphia elected to keep him for the balance of 2013/14 when its short-term deal with the power forward ran out, tacking the partially guaranteed 2014/15 season onto his contract.
The moves leave the Sixers with a full 20-man preseason roster. Only nine of their players known to have fully guaranteed deals, and the release of Varnado makes it an even more wide open race for the final regular season roster spots.