Most players who are still on non-guaranteed contracts as the NBA’s regular season begins won’t have their salaries for 2022/23 fully guaranteed until January. The league-wide salary guarantee date is January 10, and teams must waive players on non-guaranteed contracts on or before January 7 in order to avoid being on the hook for the full-season salaries.
However, a number of players on non-guaranteed deals have language in their contracts that calls for them to receive full or partial guarantees if they’re not waived before their team’s first game of the regular season. Those players are as follows:
Full guarantees:
Dalano Banton (Raptors): Partial guarantee ($300,000) increases to full guarantee ($1,563,518).- Keita Bates-Diop (Spurs): Non-guaranteed salary ($1,878,720) becomes fully guaranteed.
- Justin Champagnie (Raptors): Partial guarantee ($325,000) increases to full guarantee ($1,637,966).
- Tre Jones (Spurs): Partial guarantee ($500,000) increases to full guarantee ($1,782,621).
As our full list of early salary guarantee dates shows, Isaiah Joe (Sixers), Josh Jackson (Raptors), and D.J. Wilson (Raptors) also would’ve had their salaries become fully guaranteed if they had remained under contract through their teams’ first regular season games. However, they were all waived within the last week. Joe has since signed with the Thunder on a deal that includes a guaranteed first-year salary.
Partial guarantees:
- Matthew Dellavedova (Kings): Non-guaranteed salary ($2,628,597) becomes partially guaranteed ($250,000).
- Haywood Highsmith (Heat): Partial guarantee ($50,000) increases to $400,000.
- Luke Kornet (Celtics): Partial guarantee ($300,000) increases to $1,066,639.
- Chima Moneke (Kings): Partial guarantee ($250,000) increases to $500,000.
- Markieff Morris (Nets): Non-guaranteed salary ($2,905,581) becomes partially guaranteed ($500,000).
- KZ Okpala (Kings): Partial guarantee ($250,000) increases to $500,000.
- Edmond Sumner (Nets): Partial guarantee ($250,000) increases to $500,000.
Guarantee dates are a matter of negotiation between a team and a player, so there’s nothing stopping a club from approaching a player and asking him to agree to push that date back. If a player feels as if he’ll be waived if he says no, he may agree.
This happened last season, for instance, when Isaac Bonga‘s and Sam Dekker‘s contracts with the Raptors called for their salaries to be fully guaranteed as of opening night. Both players assented to moving their guarantee dates back to November 6. When that new deadline arrived, Toronto opted to retain Bonga and guarantee his full salary while waiving Dekker.
In other words, it’s not yet a sure thing that all the players mentioned above will get the guarantees described here, even if they remain under contract through Wednesday (or Tuesday, in Kornet’s case). We may get word in a day or two that a couple of them agreed to postpone their salary guarantee dates.
For the most part though, we should count on this group of players receiving some added security, with a handful of names coming off our list of players who still have non-guaranteed salaries.
I hope for the Celtics they pushed back the deadline for the guaranteed salary of Kornet.
Because they could use another big, like Derrick Favors for example. It would avoid Horford getting injured from playing too much.
The day will come when players in the leauge will be on month to month contracts. The owners are clearly moving in this direction.