Hoops Rumors Originals

As we head into 2017, let’s take a look back at this week’s original content published by the Hoops Rumors staff:

• Luke Adams broke down the roster counts for every team with the non-guaranteed salary deadline of January 10 looming.
• Teams can start signing free agents to 10-day contracts in January, and 21 players on NBA rosters become trade-eligible on January 15. Luke Adams provides the details on all important January dates.
• We let you know how you can track all of your favorite players on our Trade Rumors app.
• Chris Crouse gave out his latest tips on fantasy basketball, including insights on Magic point man Elfrid Payton.
• Luke Adams explored potential suitors for Kings forward Rudy Gay in our Trade Candidate series.
• We gave you info on our Reverse Standings tool, which gives you a better idea of the June draft order.
• Arthur Hill wrote his second installment of the 2017 Free Agent Power Rankings, with Kevin Durant topping the list.
• We asked readers to weigh in on a couple of topics in our Community Shootaround series.
  • There were a number of big stories in 2016, including the Warriors’ 73-win regular season, the Cavs’ first championship and Durant ditching the Thunder for Golden State. What do you think was the biggest story of the year?
  • Following up the Rudy Gay Trade Candidate piece as rumors continue to swirl, we sought out your opinion on this question: What team would be the best fit for Gay?

For the first two months of the 2016/17 NBA season, virtually every team carried a full roster of 15 players. Most NBA teams wanted to see what they had on their 15-man rosters, assessing their offseason acquisitions, their young players, and their returning veterans.

Now that clubs have a better sense of where they stand, it makes sense to maintain a little more flexibility. A team with an open roster spot can easily add a free agent or acquire a player via trade without necessarily having to make a corresponding roster move. Ten-day contracts can be signed starting on January 5, so some teams will use their final roster spot to shuttle players in and out on short-term deals.

For the rest of the season, we’ll keep tabs on every team’s roster count in this space. This post, which can be found on the right-hand sidebar under “Hoops Rumors Features,” will be updated frequently to reflect which teams have open roster spots, and which teams have players on non-guaranteed deals or 10-day contracts.

Here’s the current breakdown:

Teams with 15 fully guaranteed contracts:

• Atlanta Hawks
• Boston Celtics
• Brooklyn Nets
• Charlotte Hornets
• Chicago Bulls
• Cleveland Cavaliers
  
• Dallas Mavericks
• Denver Nuggets
• Detroit Pistons
• Golden State Warriors
• Houston Rockets
• Indiana Pacers
• Los Angeles Clippers
• Los Angeles Lakers
• Memphis Grizzlies
• Miami Heat
• Milwaukee Bucks
• Minnesota Timberwolves
• New Orleans Pelicans
• New York Knicks
• Oklahoma City Thunder
• Orlando Magic
• Phoenix Suns
• Portland Trail Blazers
• Sacramento Kings
• San Antonio Spurs
• Toronto Raptors
• Utah Jazz
• Washington Wizards

Teams with more than 15 players due to having been granted a hardship exception:

(Numbers in parentheses indicate full-season contracts + 10-day contracts.)

• Philadelphia 76ers (16)

Teams with full 15-man rosters featuring at least one player on a 10-day contract:

(Numbers in parentheses indicate full-season contracts + 10-day contracts.)

• None

Teams with open roster spots:

(Number in parentheses indicates roster count, including full-season contracts and 10-day contracts.)

• None
  

Last updated: 4-12-17 (11:21pm CT)

We at Hoops Rumors love interacting with our readers. This is why we provide an opportunity for you to hit us up with your questions in our weekly mailbag feature, which is posted each Sunday.

Have a question regarding player movement, free agent rumors, the salary cap, the NBA draft, or the top storylines of the week? You can e-mail them here: hoopsrumorsmailbag@gmail.com. Feel free to send emails throughout the week, but please be mindful that we may receive a sizable number of questions and likely won’t get to all of them.

If you missed out on any past mailbags and would like to catch up, you can view the full archives here.

Near the start of the 2016/17 campaign, we looked ahead and highlighted several dates and deadlines to watch on the NBA calendar throughout the rest of the season. While that list covered the general highlights, it’s worth taking a closer look, with January around the corner, at some of those key dates to keep an eye out for over the next month. Let’s dive in…

Non-guaranteed contracts becoming guaranteed:

January 10 is the date that all non-guaranteed salaries for 2016/17 will officially become guaranteed, but January 7 is really the day to watch. If a team wants to avoid having a salary become guaranteed, the player must clear waivers before January 10, which means he needs to be cut by January 7, at the latest.

Plenty of players without fully guaranteed salaries are in no danger of being waived within the next eight days, but several teams will take the opportunity to save a little money and open up a roster spot. We’ve already seen the Spurs do it with Nicolas Laprovittola and the Bulls do it with R.J. Hunter.

Here’s the full list of players on non-guaranteed or partially guaranteed contracts, sorted by team and by position. It’s also worth noting that two Grizzlies players – Vince Carter and JaMychal Green – will have their 2016/17 salaries become guaranteed a little early, on January 1.

Teams can sign players to 10-day contracts:

Around the same time that many NBA clubs will be opening up a roster spot by waiving a non-guaranteed salary, teams will also be able to use those newly-created openings to sign players to 10-day contracts. Those 10-day deals, which can be signed as of January 5, give teams the opportunity to pick up a short-term injury replacement, or perhaps to get a brief look at a standout D-League player.

We have extensively outlined the details of 10-day contracts and explained how they work in our glossary entry on the subject.

More players becoming trade-eligible:

A huge percentage of the NBA’s offseason signees became eligible to be traded on December 15, but there are still many players who can’t be dealt. By the end of January, that list of players ineligible to be traded will shrink further, since there are two dozen players currently on track to have those restrictions lift this month.

January 15 is the key date, as 21 players will become trade-eligible as of that Sunday. That includes players who aren’t going anywhere, like LeBron James, Mike Conley, and DeMar DeRozan, but there are a handful of players on that list that could be involved in trade rumors in 2017 — the Trail Blazers, for instance, are likely to make at least one deal in the coming months, and they’ll have Allen Crabbe, Maurice Harkless, and Meyers Leonard become trade-eligible on January 15.

The Blazers will have one more player become eligible to be dealt this month, in C.J. McCollum — the young guard will have his trade restrictions lifted on January 27, six months after he signed his extension. James Harden (January 9) and Ryan Kelly (January 31) also have unique trade-eligible dates next month.

Medical retirement for Nikola Pekovic?

Timberwolves center Nikola Pekovic has been ruled out for the entire 2016/17 season due to injuries, and he admitted this week that his health problems may force him into early retirement. If, one year after he last played in an NBA game, a player is ruled by an independent doctor to be medically unfit to continue his basketball career, his cap hit can be removed from his team’s books. The one-year anniversary of Pekovic’s last game with the Wolves arrives on January 31, so it will be interesting whether to see if the two sides pursue that medical retirement option at that point.

Other odds and ends:

There are a few other dates in January that are worth mentioning, but will perhaps come and go without any fanfare.

On January 10, mid-level and room exceptions – along with other cap exceptions – will start to pro-rate for the year, meaning a team with its full room exception available will no longer be able to offer the full $2.898MM amount to a free agent. Exceptions will decline in value by 1/170th per day, starting on January 10.

On January 12, one of the Cavaliers’ four trade exceptions will expire — it’s only worth about $845K, so it will almost certainly go unused.

January 15, meanwhile, is the last day that teams can apply for a disabled player exception to replace a player who is out for the season. A disabled player exception can give a club extra cap flexibility, though a team would still has to open up a roster spot to add a player using that DPE.

[Previously: NBA December dates to watch]

Hoops Rumors lets you keep up with your favorite teams as they plot their moves, and we also provide ways to easily follow the latest on all of your favorite players and trade candidates. You can get news about players wherever you go with our Trade Rumors app, available for iOS and Android devices. The app is free and allows you to add a feed for any player and set up notifications that will alert you whenever we write about him.

Every player we’ve written about has his own rumors page. You can find any player by using our search box (located in the right sidebar); by clicking his tag at the bottom of a post in which he’s discussed; or, by simply typing his name in your address bar after hoopsrumors.com, substituting dashes for spaces. For example, Kevin Durant’s page is hoopsrumors.com/kevin-durant.

You can also set up an RSS feed for any of our player pages by adding /feed to the end of the page URL, like this: hoopsrumors.com/demarcus-cousins/feed. Entering that URL into the reader of your choice should enable you to get updates whenever we write about DeMarcus Cousins. It works for teams, too. If you’re a Kings fan, you can enter hoopsrumors.com/sacramento-kings/feed into your reader and stay on top of all the latest from Sacramento.

In addition to players and teams, there are a number of other subjects you can track by clicking on the tags that we use at the bottom of posts. You can keep tabs on news related to the Collective Bargaining Agreement right here. Items about the NBA D-League can be found on this page. You can simply scan our top stories here. Again, you can set up a feed with any of these pages by adding /feed to the end of the URL.