Nuggets Waive Miller, Benimon, Williams

12:53pm: The Nuggets have officially waived Miller, the team announced.

MONDAY, 12:40pm: Miller’s release no longer appears on the RealGM transactions log, and the team has been looking to find a taker for him via trade, tweets Chris Dempsey of The Denver Post. However, the Nuggets haven’t found any trade partners and are set to release Miller in advance of today’s 4:00pm Central deadline for teams to submit their opening-night rosters.

WEDNESDAY, 1:52pm: The Nuggets have waived Miller, according to the RealGM transactions log, though the team has yet to make an official announcement about him.

1:10pm: Denver has officially released Benimon and Williams, the team announced, though Miller remains with the team for now, according to Dempsey, who indicates that the Nuggets are thinking of keeping him right up until they have to let him go to make Monday’s opening-night roster deadline (Twitter links).

8:28am: The Nuggets are waiving Quincy Miller, reports Shams Charania of RealGM (Twitter link), and the team will also release Marcus Williams and Jerrelle Benimon, according to Chris Dempsey of The Denver Post. The moves will drop the Nuggets to the 15-player regular season maximum and allow the team to keep Alonzo Gee and his non-guaranteed contract for opening night, Dempsey points out. They also signal that Erick Green will remain with the team into the regular season in spite of only $50K in guaranteed salary. Dempsey indicates that the Nuggets have already placed Miller on waivers, though the team has made no official announcement.

The Nuggets part ways with Miller in spite of his $150K partial guarantee, one that would have escalated to cover his entire minimum salary had he made it to opening night. The team drafted him 38th overall in 2012, but he struggled to recover from tearing his left ACL as a high school senior, when he was the fifth-best prospect in the country, according to the Recruiting Services Consensus Index. He averaged 4.9 points and 2.8 rebounds in 15.2 minutes per game last season, the first in which he felt fully healthy since the injury, Dempsey notes, but that wasn’t enough to save his spot on the roster for this year.

The Nuggets also owe a $35K partial guarantee to Benimon, who joined the team after going undrafted in June and appearing in summer league with Denver as well as the Heat. Williams, a forward from the University of Arizona not to be confused with the point guard by the same name, signed a non-guaranteed contract with Denver in an effort to make it back to the NBA for his first regular season action since the 2008/09 season.

Gee’s defense helped fuel the Nuggets decision-making, and he had four steals in Tuesday’s preseason game, as Dempsey points out. He earned a measure of stability after a summer that saw him go from the Cavs to the Pelicans to the Rockets to the Kings in a series of trades before Sacramento waived him, freeing the Nuggets to ink the 27-year-old small forward. Green, the 46th overall pick in 2013, signed with the Nuggets this year after playing last season with Montepaschi Siena of Italy.