Contract guarantee dates are often the reason why players end up on waivers. Eric Moreland, Brendan Haywood and Ricky Ledo have all met the end of their time with their respective teams in the past two days, largely because those teams didn’t want to guarantee their salaries, or at least a portion of them. More figure to join that trio soon, with Saturday the key day for a handful, as the schedule of contract guarantee dates shows.
Players and teams are free to negotiate dates on which a salary may become fully or partially guaranteed should the player remain under contract. If a player has non-guaranteed salary and no date is specified in the contract, his salary would become guaranteed if he hasn’t cleared waivers by January 10th. Thus, January 7th is the de facto leaguewide guarantee date, since players waived that day would clear waivers January 9th.
The Nuggets and Wilson Chandler got a head start on all that this offseason, as Chandler’s $2MM partial guarantee had already become a full guarantee of nearly $7.172MM by early May. The sides later upped his salary to more than $10.449MM in a renegotiation. The rest of the players to have had their full salaries guaranteed have seen those dates come and pass over the last month. They’re listed below, with their respective salary figures rounded to the nearest $1K. Note that this doesn’t include players who’ve earned partial guarantees, since they still have a ways to go:
- Jamal Crawford (Clippers), $5,675MM (had been partially guaranteed for $1.5MM)
- Chris Kaman (Trail Blazers), $5.016MM (had been partially guaranteed for $1MM)
- Trevor Booker (Jazz) $4.775MM (had been partially guaranteed for $250K)
- Matt Barnes (Grizzlies) $3.543MM (had been partially guaranteed for $1MM)
- Randy Foye (Nuggets) $3.135MM
- Anthony Tolliver (Pistons), $3MM (had been partially guaranteed for $400K)
- Beno Udrih (Grizzlies) $2.17MM (had been partially guaranteed for $923K)
- Jon Leuer (Suns), $1.035MM
- Isaiah Canaan (Sixers), minimum (had been partially guaranteed for $758K)
- Ray McCallum (Spurs), minimum (had been partially guaranteed for $200K)
- E’Twaun Moore (Bulls), minimum
- Robert Sacre (Lakers), minimum
- Russ Smith (Grizzlies) minimum (had been partially guaranteed for $150K)
Note: The Lakers have decided to keep Jordan Clarkson through his guarantee date on Saturday.
The Basketball Insiders salary pages were used in the creation of this post.