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.