When a player signs a contract that includes unlikely incentives, those incentives can be worth up to 15% of the player’s base salary. The Spurs took full advantage of that rule last summer when they signed Chris Paul, making the most of their cap room by agreeing to a one-year deal with a base salary of $10.46MM and another $1.569MM in achievable unlikely incentives that wouldn’t count against the cap.
Paul began cashing in on those incentives on Wednesday, according to ESPN’s Bobby Marks (Twitter link), when the Spurs registered their 32nd win of the season, beating the Nuggets in Denver. The veteran point guard earned a $262K bonus as a result of the team reaching that win total, Marks reports.
Paul is on track to earn another $523K before the end of the season by meeting two more individual performance benchmarks, Marks tweets. As Marks previously wrote for ESPN.com, those bonuses are related to Paul’s net rating and true shooting percentage.
Here’s more on the Spurs:
- Spurs wing Devin Vassell was held out of Wednesday’s win for left ankle injury management, missing a game for the first time since December 6. Acting head coach Mitch Johnson explained that the team decided to rest Vassell because he was “getting a little bit too much in the danger zone” after having been playing through an ankle injury, writes Tom Orsborn of The San Antonio Express-News. “It’s being mindful of the big picture, keeping him healthy, and so we made the call,” Johnson said.
- A throw-in piece in the De’Aaron Fox blockbuster in February, guard Jordan McLaughlin has barely played for the Spurs since being dealt from Sacramento to San Antonio. But he was a +8 in 17 minutes of action in Denver on Wednesday and made a crucial three-point shot in the fourth quarter. With just nine Spurs players active for the game, McLaughlin said the reserves’ attitude was to “go out there and have fun,” as Orsborn relays. “We all work really hard behind the scenes even when we’re not playing, so it was just a great opportunity for us to go out there and play basketball,” the veteran guard said.
- Scott King, the head coach of the Austin Spurs, San Antonio’s G League affiliate, has been named the NBAGL’s Coach of the Year, the league announced on Wednesday (Twitter link). A former Knicks player development coach, King led Austin to a 22-12 record and the No. 2 seed in the G League’s Western Conference in his first year at the helm, finishing ahead of runners-up DeSagana Diop (Westchester Knicks) and Quinton Crawford (Stockton Kings) in a vote conducted by the league’s 31 head coaches and GMs. At the time of his hiring, one report indicated that King was viewed as a future NBA head coach — he likely bolstered his case with his performance this season.
- Speaking to Grant Afseth of RG.org, Spurs two-way forward Harrison Ingram said his goal is to earn a standard contract. The 48th overall pick in the 2024 draft, Ingram has appeared in just three games for San Antonio this season, having spent most of the year in Austin, an experience he discussed with Afseth. He’ll be eligible for restricted free agency this summer.