The Magic scored an impressive $8,193,029 trade exception, equivalent to Channing Frye‘s salary, from Thursday’s trade with the Cavs, reports Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders (Twitter link). Orlando is poised to have enough cap room to sign two players to maximum-salary contracts this summer, so it’s likely that the team renounces that exception in July, but the Frye exception could still come in handy for trades around draft time. The Magic could choose to remain technically over the cap by keeping the cap holds for their own free agents and using sign-and-trades to bring in outside free agent targets. That would allow them to keep the sizable Frye exception until it expires next February, but sign-and-trades are inherently more difficult to pull off than conventional signings.
There’s more from the Southeast Division:
- Magic coach Scott Skiles has been monitoring the progress of Brandon Jennings for years, writes John Denton of NBA.com. Orlando added depth to its backcourt this week by picking up Jennings in a trade with the Pistons. Skiles has been keeping an eye on the seventh-year guard, whom he coached for three and a half years in Milwaukee, and said Jennings “was playing the best basketball of his career’’ before the Achilles injury in January of 2015 that kept him out of action for about a year.
- New Wizard Markieff Morris already feels at home in Washington, relays Keely Diven of CSNMidAtlantic. The power forward was traded Thursday from the Suns after a rocky season in Phoenix. He said reuniting with Marcin Gortat and Jared Dudley, who were his teammates on the 2011/12 Suns, made the transition easy.
- Kirk Hinrich was caught off guard by a trade right before Thursday’s deadline that sent him from the Bulls to the Hawks, according to Chris Vivlamore of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This is the second stint in Atlanta for Hinrich, who was also traded there by the Wizards in 2011. “I was shocked but after it settled in I’m excited for the opportunity, whatever it may be,” Hinrich said of his latest trade. “I just didn’t see it coming. I’m in Cleveland doing my game-day routine and I got the phone call. I was a little surprised.”
Chuck Myron contributed to this post.