6:58pm: The trade is official, the Clippers have announced. Los Angeles sent Cunningham, the draft rights to Akyol and cash considerations to the Sixers in exchange for the draft rights to Lishuk. The deal allows the Clippers to create a trade exception worth $915,243, the equivalent of Cunningham’s salary. Philadelphia has yet to make an announcement, and the Sixers couldn’t have traded for Cunningham without offloading someone, since they were carrying a 15-man roster, so it would seem there’s another part of the equation still to be revealed.
6:25pm: The Clippers will receive the rights to Serhiy Lishuk from the Sixers, and Philadelphia will acquire the rights to Cenk Akyol, Bolch reports (Twitter link). Akyol, 27, was selected in the second round of the 2005 NBA draft, and Lishuk, 32, was the No. 49 overall pick in the 2004 draft.
4:52pm: The Sixers and Clippers will also be swapping rights to draft picks as part of the deal, Ben Bolch of The Los Angeles Times tweets.
2:32pm: The Clippers have inquired about Wroten, but those are preliminary talks, according to John Gonzalez of CSNPhilly.com (Twitter link).
2:01pm: It’ll be cash going Philly’s way from the Clippers, and the Sixers will indeed waive Cunningham once they acquire him, Wojnarowski tweets.
1:59pm: The Clippers aren’t taking any players back in the deal, according to Wojnarowski (on Twitter). That means the Sixers would have to offload someone before the deal can become official.
1:56pm: Tony Wroten is the Clips’ target in the deal, according to Dan Woike of the Orange County Register (on Twitter). Wroten, who’s averaging 30.5 minutes per game for Philly, is on a guaranteed rookie-scale contract that would further tighten the squeeze under the team’s hard cap.
1:53pm: The Sixers are unlikely to keep Cunningham once they acquire him, according to Wojnarowski (Twitter link). Ben Bolch of the Los Angeles Times counters that the Clips are merely exploring a move that will affect whether or not they waive Cunningham (Twitter link).
1:38pm: The Clippers are trading Jared Cunningham to the Sixers, reports Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports (Twitter link). Cunningham has a non-guaranteed deal and the Clippers were set to waive him in advance of today’s deadline to do so before his minimum salary would have become guaranteed for the balance of the season. Philadelphia has 15 players on its roster, so it’ll need to either send someone to L.A. or make a corresponding move. That’s true even if the Sixers don’t intend to keep Cunningham, as is often the case with the veterans the Sixers acquire via trade.
Trading Cunningham instead of releasing him would help the Clippers financially, since it would remove his entire salary from their books, notes Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders (Twitter link). The Clippers would be stuck with the money they had already paid to Cunningham this year counting against their hard cap if they were to waive him. The team is less than $1MM shy of its hard cap, a collective bargaining agreement feature it triggered when it gave out the non-taxpayer’s mid-level exception to Spencer Hawes and the biannual exception to Jordan Farmar.
Cunningham, the 24th overall pick in the 2012 draft, has only played in 40 career NBA regular season games, 19 of which have come this season after he showed enough in the preseason to make the team out of training camp. Still, he’s averaged 1.8 points in just 4.7 minutes per game for the Clippers.