7:03pm: The Suns have officially announced the waiver claim of Jenkins.
4:14pm: The Suns have claimed John Jenkins off waivers from the Mavericks, according to Shams Charania of The Vertical on Yahoo Sports (Twitter link). The team has yet to make a formal announcement, but the move had to have taken place before 4:00pm Central, when Jenkins was set to become a free agent had no team put in a claim. He’s on a three-year minimum-salary contract, and the minimum salary exception only accommodates two-year deals, so Phoenix is using part of the $1.56MM trade exception it created in the Markieff Morris deal last week. It’s a boon for Dallas, which gets to subtract the more than $981K cap hit for Jenkins from this season’s books. The Suns are responsible for that plus his remaining paychecks this year.
Jenkins, who turns 25 next month, goes into Phoenix’s open roster spot, so no corresponding move is necessary. He’ll provide depth on the wing, where the Suns have been thin in the wake of T.J. Warren‘s season-ending broken foot. The Mavericks didn’t give Jenkins much playing time in the regular season, as he’s averaged a career low 9.2 minutes per game, even though he was one of the surprises of the preseason, when he put up 19.7 points in 28.4 minutes a night across seven appearances. Dallas waived Jenkins to make room for David Lee, who came free via buyout from the Celtics.
The Suns have the ability to control Jenkins through 2017/18, since his contract contains non-guaranteed minimum salaries for the next two seasons. He holds promise, having been the 23rd overall pick in 2012, and he’s a passable floor-stretching threat, having hit 35.7% of his 227 3-point attempts over the course of 119 NBA regular season games. Phoenix nonetheless burns the majority of the Morris exception, which declines in value to $578,652, largely unusable except for rookie minimum deals.
Can you explain how the trade exception for Markieff Morris came to be? It appears the trade for him with WAS was a simultaneous trade from both directions, and I thought trade exceptions could only be created with non-simultaneous trades? Also didn’t they just sign Phil Pressey to a 10-day contract? Does that mean he was released early from the deal to accommodate this?
You can gain a trade exception worth a player’s partial salary if you don’t aggregate that salary with anyone else’s. The salaries for Humphries and Blair added up to $1.56MM less than the Morris salary, allowing the exception for the difference.
And as far as Pressey goes, his addition DID give the Suns 15 guys, but they waived DeJuan Blair to create another open roster spot.
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