Nick Collison Re-Signs With Thunder, Will Retire In 2018

JULY 21st, 2:40pm: The signing is official, Gary Washburn of the Boston Globe tweets.

JULY 14th, 11:31am: The Thunder and Nick Collison have reached an agreement on a one-year contract, reports Shams Charania of The Vertical (Twitter link). According to Charania, the one-year deal will “end” Collison’s long NBA career with the franchise, so it sounds like he’ll retire at the end of the 2017/18 season.

Collison, who will turn 37 in October, has appeared in 895 total regular season games for Seattle and Oklahoma City, but has an extremely limited role at this stage of his career. In 2016/17, he played just 128 total minutes in 20 games for the Thunder, averaging 1.7 PPG and 1.6 RPG. In what figures to be his final season, he’ll serve more as a veteran mentor on the bench than as a key on-court contributor for the club.

While terms of the deal weren’t reported, the Thunder have used their taxpayer mid-level exception, and won’t use their bi-annual exception to avoid becoming hard-capped. So Collison will be in line for a one-year, minimum salary contract.

That deal will pay Collison about $2.329MM, but will only count for $1.471MM for OKC’s team salary and tax purposes. Our story on this year’s minimum salaries explains the details on those numbers.