The Pelicans have waived Dionte Christmas, the team announced. The one-year veteran came to training camp on a non-guaranteed contract, so New Orleans isn’t stuck paying him any salary. The move brings the team’s roster to 17, with at least two more subtractions to come in the 10 days before the October 27th deadline to set the opening-night roster.
Christmas appeared in just one preseason game for four minutes this month, and he didn’t see much playing time with the Suns last season, even though the favorite of GM Ryan McDonough stuck on the Phoenix roster for all of 2013/14. The 28-year-old swingman totaled just 198 minutes last year, though he recorded a 11.1 PER that’s not too shabby for a player at the end of a team’s bench.
New Orleans has 12 fully guaranteed deals plus partially guaranteed salary for three more. Darius Miller has the largest partial guarantee at $400K, but neither Luke Babbitt nor Patric Young is assured of more than $100K as they attempt to keep Kevin Jones and D.J. Stephens, who have non-guaranteed contracts, from grabbing their spots.