JULY 27: The NBA has issued a press release confirming the new two-way rules detailed below and announcing that a player on a two-way contract will be capped at 50 games on his team’s active list next season.
JULY 16: The NBA and the NBPA have agreed to carry over many of this season’s adjusted rules for two-way players to the 2021/22 season, reports ESPN’s Bobby Marks (Twitter link).
The league loosened the restrictions on how much time two-way players were permitted to spend in the NBA during the 2020/21 campaign and scrapped the typical midseason deadline for two-way signings. As Marks explains (via Twitter), the following adjustments will apply in 2021/22:
- There will be no in-season deadline to sign a player to a two-way contract.
- The salary for a two-way player will be half of the rookie minimum. Currently, the rookie minimum projects to be $925,258, in which case the two-way salary would be $462,629.
- Two-way players won’t face the usual 45-day NBA limit. However, there will be a cap on how many games they can spend on a team’s active list.
One notable change from this past season will be discontinued next year, according to Marks: A player on a two-way contract won’t be eligible to play in the postseason.
This year, players on two-way contracts were permitted to be active in the playoffs, but in 2021/22, if a team wants its two-way player to be available in the postseason, he’ll have to be converted to a standard deal before the end of the regular season.
They could stop calling it two-way, a term which is used to mean at least one other thing.
What are you implying?
At first, a two-way meant a simple light switch. Then, a chili & cheese on a plate not in a bowl, with hard utensils, for a buck eighty at Skyway. In college it meant bi, as in, goes both ways.
Then the internet came and for basketball social media, it meant good on offense AND defense. Then it became the term used in the NBA for contractual ownership of players kind of in between the NBA and GL before they could slip away to sign with foreign leagues. I suspect now it may be code for black-raced, as in, They should dump these guys and get some two-way players in.
In the future it may replace “bilateral” because that term has too many syllables and we don’t go to school anymore…