1:01am: The deal is for the minimum salary and includes a small guarantee, NetsDaily tweets, citing a league source.
11:50am: The Nets have signed point guard Donald Sloan, the team announced via press release. The new client of Byron Irvin and Dan Fegan became a free agent when his deal with the Pacers expired at the end of June.
Sloan is coming off a career-high 21 starts for an injury-riddled Indiana team this past season. The four-year veteran spent the past two seasons with the Pacers after having played for three teams in his first couple of years in the league. He’s a strong distributor, averaging 3.6 assists against 1.2 turnovers per game in 2014/15, and he was the fourth most efficient assist producer left in free agency, as I noted last week. He was in talks with the Spurs, Bulls and Mavericks last month, as Shams Charania of RealGM reported then, so the Nets appear to have been a more recent suitor.
Brooklyn is hanging around the $84.74MM tax threshold, with less than that figure in guaranteed salary but more than that if non-guaranteed salary is factored in. Sloan made the minimum this past season, and it would be somewhat surprising to see him make more this time around. Still, the Nets do have $2.464MM left on their mid-level exception that they could use if they’re on board with triggering a hard cap of $4MM above the tax line.
The Nets have only 12 fully guaranteed contracts, but Markel Brown, Quincy Miller, Willie Reed and rookie Ryan Boatright all have partially guaranteed pacts, as our roster counts show. Sloan figures to compete with Boatright for the job as Brooklyn’s third point guard behind Jarrett Jack and Shane Larkin.