- Brandon Ingram‘s new contract shows the Pelicans consider him as much a part of their future as Zion Williamson, notes William Guillory of The Athletic. Ingram signed the largest contract of the offseason, earning $158.25MM over the next five years.
DECEMBER 1: Magnay has formally signed his two-way deal with New Orleans, according to the NBA’s official transactions log.
NOVEMBER 26: The Pelicans have agreed to sign center Will Magnay to a two-way contract, according to Olgun Uluc of ESPN (via Twitter).
The 22-year-old most recently played in the Australian NBL. The 6’10” big man was voted that league’s Most Improved Player for the 2019/20 season, while playing for the Brisbane Bullets. For the season, Magnay tallied averages of 8.1 PPG, 6.1 RPG, and an NBL-leading 2.1 BPG. Magnay went undrafted in 2018.
The Pelicans have been active in reshaping their center rotation this offseason. They recently traded for former Thunder center Steven Adams and signed former Hornets big man Willy Hernangomez to be his primary backup. Raw second-year center Jaxson Hayes remains on the roster as well.
Magnay joins undrafted forward Naji Marshall in reportedly filling out both of New Orleans’s two-way contract slots. This year, two-way players can partake in up to 50 games for their NBA clubs.
After receiving a trade bonus worth $2MM as part of the deal that sent him from Oklahoma City to New Orleans, Pelicans center Steven Adams will have a new 7.5% trade kicker on his two-year extension with his new team, tweets Eric Pincus of Bleacher Report. That kicker will give Adams a rare opportunity to potentially cash in on two trade bonuses between free agencies.
Meanwhile, Keith Smith of Yahoo Sports reports (via Twitter) that another new Pelicans center, Willy Hernangomez, will only have a partial guarantee on his new deal with the team. Hernangomez is assured of receiving at least $700K of his $1.74MM minimum salary for 2020/21, Smith notes.
Here are a few more notes on recently-signed contracts from around the NBA:
- Both years on Bol Bol‘s two-year contract with the Nuggets are fully guaranteed, tweets Eric Pincus. Denver used a portion of its mid-level exception to complete the $4.2MM deal.
- Dwayne Bacon‘s new two-year contract with the Magic is for the veteran’s minimum and will be non-guaranteed for 2021/22, tweets Keith Smith. If Bacon remains under contract for more than three days after 2021’s free agency moratorium ends, he’ll get that full guarantee on year two, Smith adds.
- While most of the two-way contracts that have been signed by players in the last week are only for one year, Sean McDermott’s deal with the Grizzlies will cover two years, tweets Smith.
NOVEMBER 24: Now that the trade sending him to New Orleans has been completed, the Pelicans have officially announced their extension agreement with Adams.
NOVEMBER 23: As part of the trade that will send center Steven Adams from Oklahoma City to New Orleans, the Pelicans are signing Adams to a two-year contract extension worth $35MM, sources tell Zach Lowe and Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN (Twitter links). The deal, which will run through 2022/23, will be fully guaranteed, per the ESPN duo.
Teams are permitted to extend players as part of trades, though those deals are limited to three total years, including the ones remaining on the player’s current contract. Since Adams is on an expiring contract, the Pelicans are able to tack on two new years. Worth $17.5MM annually, the extension will represent a dip from the big man’s current $27.5MM salary.
As we relayed earlier tonight, the Pelicans reportedly pursued Adams during the 2019 offseason. Their willingness to surrender a first-round pick for him and sign him to an extension are two more signs that he’s a player they value significantly.
In 2019/20, Adams averaged 10.9 PPG, 9.3 RPG, and 2.3 APG in 63 games (26.7 MPG) as Oklahoma City’s starting center, helping to anchor the team’s defense. He’ll presumably take on a similar role in New Orleans, playing alongside Zion Williamson in the Pelicans’ starting five.
Adams is now on track to reach unrestricted free agency at age 30 in 2023.
Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.
The Pelicans, Thunder, Bucks, and Nuggets have officially completed the four-team trade that will send Jrue Holiday to Milwaukee and Steven Adams to New Orleans, the Pelicans announced today in a press release.
In total, the mega-deal involves 10 players, five draft picks, and two future pick swaps. The trade breaks down as follows:
- Bucks acquire Holiday and the draft rights to Sam Merrill (No. 60 pick; from Pelicans).
- Pelicans acquire Adams, Eric Bledsoe, the Bucks’ 2025 first-round pick (unprotected), the Bucks’ 2027 first-round pick (unprotected), and the right to swap first-round picks with the Bucks in 2024 and 2026.
- Thunder acquire George Hill, Darius Miller, Kenrich Williams (sign-and-trade), Josh Gray (sign-and-trade), Zylan Cheatham (sign-and-trade), the Nuggets’ 2023 first-round pick (top-14 protected), the Wizards’ 2023 second-round pick (from Pelicans), and the Hornets’ 2024 second-round pick (from Pelicans).
- Nuggets acquire the draft rights to RJ Hampton (No. 24 pick; from Bucks).
The deal began when the Bucks and Pelicans reached an agreement on a trade sending Holiday to Milwaukee last week. From there, the Thunder got involved when New Orleans agreed to flip Hill to Oklahoma City in a trade for Adams.
A draft-night deal between the Nuggets and Pelicans that involved the Nuggets’ 2023 first-rounder and the Bucks’ No. 24 pick (sent to New Orleans as part of the original Holiday agreement) was folded in to make it a four-team trade when the Pels agreed to flip Denver’s ’23 pick to OKC as part of the Adams package.
As cap expert Albert Nahmad has pointed out (via Twitter), it’s an intricate, complex transaction that had to make use of a slew of CBA rules. The Pelicans, who are signing Adams to a two-year extension as part of the trade, needed to sign-and-trade Williams, Gray, and Cheatham to Oklahoma City and guarantee most or all of Miller’s $7MM salary in order to abide by salary-matching rules.
Meanwhile, Adams gets a trade bonus worth a little over $2MM as part of the deal, while the Thunder create the largest trade exception in NBA history, worth $27.5MM, per ESPN’s Bobby Marks (Twitter link).
Unfortunately, as Nahmad observes (via Twitter), Oklahoma City will likely have to use that massive TPE immediately to accommodate the acquisition of Al Horford. Still, as John Hollinger of The Athletic writes, the Thunder should come out of their series of transactions with a handful of usable trade exceptions, including one worth $15.4MM.
A full breakdown of this offseason’s trades – including the ones not yet made official – can be found right here.
Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.
The Thunder are trading center Steven Adams to the Pelicans and it isn’t the first time New Orleans tried to make that happen, ESPN’s Royce Young tweets. The Pelicans pursued an Adams trade last offseason when the Thunder shook up their roster by trading Paul George and Russell Westbrook but the teams couldn’t work out an agreement at that time.
NOVEMBER 30: Both signings are now official, per RealGM’s NBA transactions log.
NOVEMBER 23: The Pelicans are filling two of their roster spots with forward Wenyen Gabriel and guard Sindarius Thornwell, ESPN’s Andrew Lopez tweets.
Both will play on veteran minimum deals. Gabriel is receiving a two-year contract with a team option for the 2021/22 season.
New Orleans plans to go with a 14-player roster, including restricted free agent Brandon Ingram, Will Guillory of The Athletic tweets. Ingram has yet to sign but he’s expected to get a max contract.
The Pelicans also plan to fill both two-way slots, Guillory adds.
Gabriel began last season with the Kings and was traded in midseason to the Trail Blazers. The undrafted Gabriel appeared in a combined 30 regular-season games as a rookie and also saw action in four postseason games.
Thornwell was part of the Clippers’ rotation for two seasons but appeared in just two games with the Pelicans last season after signing as a substitute player during the restart. Otherwise, he spent the 2019/20 season with the Rio Grande Valley Vipers in the G League.
Big man Serge Ibaka was not bereft of contending suitors in free agency, according to Michael Scotto of HoopsHype. Scotto notes that the Raptors, the team with whom Ibaka spent most of the last four seasons, apparently offered a one-year, $12MM deal to Ibaka for an encore appearance in 2020/21. Toronto was believed to be unwilling to offer multiple years, which would have cut into the team’s projected 2021 cap space.
The Nets also wanted Ibaka, but could only afford a taxpayer mid-level exception, which would have started at $5.7MM this season. Ibaka ultimately inked a two-year, $19MM contract with the Clippers.
Here are more free agency rumors:
- Though swingman Wesley Iwundu ultimately opted to sign a two-year, veteran’s minimum contract with the Mavericks, the Hawks, Pelicans and Kings were also in the running for Iwundu’s services this offseason, Scotto reports in the same piece.
- The Mavericks and Kings also considered adding reserve center Willy Hernangomez before he agreed to terms with the Pelicans on a one-year, veteran’s minimum deal, per Scotto. Hernangomez’s 2019/20 club, the Hornets, also apparently wanted to re-sign the 26-year-old big man.
- Scotto reports that former Kings wing Kent Bazemore also found himself in high demand this offseason before agreeing to a one-year veteran’s minimum deal with the Warriors. The Lakers, Clippers, Bucks, Celtics, Suns, Knicks, Nets, and Hornets were all interested in adding the three-and-D vet this offseason.
Kenrich Williams, Josh Gray, and Zylan Cheatham will be dealt from the Pelicans to the Thunder as part of the massive multi-team trade that will send Jrue Holiday to Milwaukee and Steven Adams to New Orleans, reports Shams Charania of The Athletic (via Twitter).
[RELATED: Thunder trading Steven Adams to Pelicans]
The Pelicans needed to send out a little more salary in order to accommodate the incoming contracts of Adams ($27.5MM) and Eric Bledsoe ($16.9MM). Because Williams, Gray, and Cheatham were free agents, they’ll have to be signed-and-traded to be included in the deal.
Sign-and-trade contracts must run for at least three seasons, with a fully guaranteed first year, so being included in the trade will work out well for Williams, Gray, and Cheatham, as Bobby Marks of ESPN notes (via Twitter). They would have been hard-pressed to find fully guaranteed minimum-salary contracts on the open market.
Darius Miller – who is also being sent to Oklahoma City from New Orleans – is another big winner in the swap, as he’ll have his $7MM salary guaranteed for salary-matching purposes.
With all of those players being included in the deal, Adams will no longer be required to waive his trade kicker, worth about $2MM, tweets Marks. That’ll bump the veteran center’s cap hit to about $29.6MM.
As reported by Charania, the blockbuster Holiday/Adams deal currently looks like this:
- Bucks to acquire Holiday and the draft rights to Sam Merrill (No. 60 pick; from Pelicans).
- Pelicans to acquire Adams, Bledsoe, the Bucks’ 2025 first-round pick (unprotected), the Bucks’ 2027 first-round pick (unprotected), and the right to swap first-round picks with the Bucks in 2024 and 2026.
- Thunder to acquire George Hill, Miller, Williams, Gray, Cheatham, the Nuggets’ 2023 first-round pick (top-14 protected), the Wizards’ 2023 second-round pick (from Pelicans), and the Hornets’ 2024 second-round pick (from Pelicans).
- Nuggets to acquire the draft rights to RJ Hampton (No. 24 pick; from Bucks).
It’s not clear if that’s what the trade will look like in its final form or if more pieces will be added before it becomes official.
The Bucks are taking the protections off the 2022 first-round pick they previously sent to the Cavaliers, and Cleveland is getting an extra second-round pick for Milwaukee for accommodating that change, which frees up the future first-rounders to be sent to New Orleans. That pick going to the Cavs will be Indiana’s 2025 second-rounder, per John Hollinger of The Athletic.
The Bucks/Cavaliers aspect of the deal could be completed separately, as cap expert Albert Nahmad tweets. But if it gets rolled into this trade, it would mean a fifth team joining the fray once it becomes official.
NOVEMBER 24: The Pelicans have officially signed Hernangomez, per the NBA’s transactions log.
NOVEMBER 22: The Pelicans are set to sign center Willy Hernangomez to a one-year veteran’s minimum contract, Shams Charania of The Athletic and Stadium tweets. With four years of NBA experience to his credit, Hernangomez should earn $1,737,145 on such a deal.
The 250-pound 6’11” journeyman center, 26, started his NBA career with the Knicks, who drafted him with the 35th pick in 2015. Hernangomez finally joined New York for the 2016/17 season, and was eventually flipped to the Hornets in 2018. He will now back up starting Pelicans center Steven Adams, sent to New Orleans in a recent trade by the Thunder.
Hernangomez will essentially replace reserve center Jahlil Okafor in the New Orleans rotation. Okafor left the Pelicans for the Pistons in free agency. Hernangomez holds career averages of 6.9 PPG and 5.4 RPG in just 14.4 MPG.