Western Notes: Smith, Kings, Durant

Russ Smith‘s minimum salary became fully guaranteed at the end of Saturday when the Grizzlies elected not to waive him. He’d had a $150K partial guarantee on that salary that he picked up July 15th, as the schedule of salary guarantee dates shows.

Here’s more from the Western Conference:

• The Kings are parting ways with analytics guru Dean Oliver, Bill Herenda of CSN California confirms. This move is not necessarily an indication that the team is moving away from a data-driven approach. Sacramento is looking to hire someone to replace Oliver, Marc Stein of ESPN.com tweets.
• The reason behind the move is that vice president of basketball operations Vlade Divac wants to assemble his own hand-picked front office cabinet, Stein adds (Twitter link). It was reported yesterday that former Kings star Peja Stojakovic received an offer to join the front office.
• Kevin Durant, who is still recovering from his foot surgery that ended his season, will visit the team USA minicamp next month in Vegas and clearly wants to be part of the program, Sam Amick of USA Today reports (Twitter link). The Olympic games will be in August of 2016, which is roughly a month after Durant is eligible to sign a new contract.

Chuck Myron contributed to this post.