JULY 13TH, 5:02pm: The Grizzlies have officially re-signed Speights, the team announced today in a press release.
JULY 6TH, 8:43am: Speights' two-year deal is actually worth almost $9MM and has a second-year player option, rather than a team option, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal. As I noted below, the terms initially reported seemed awfully team-friendly, so this makes more sense.
With the NBA's 2012 free agent period just two days away, teams continue to extend qualifying offers to free agents in order to make them restricted. If a qualifying offer is not tendered to a player eligible for restricted free agency, he becomes an unrestricted free agent.
Players who are tendered qualifying offers have the option to accept the one-year contract and hit unrestricted free agency a year from now, but the primary purpose of the offers are to ensure that the player's team can match any offers for him this summer. We'll track today's qualifying offer updates right here, with the latest added to the top of the page….
Earlier updates:
The Grizzlies have received a disabled player exception as compensation for losing Darrell Arthur, GM Chris Wallace confirmed to Ronald Tillery of the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Arthur had surgery in December to repair a torn achilles tendon and will miss the season.
Under the new CBA, teams are eligible to receive a disabled player exception worth the lesser of 50% of the injured player's salary or the amount of the non-taxpayer mid-level exception. In this case, half of Arthur's salary works out to just over $1MM, so Wallace doesn't have much flexibility.
"I can't say for certain if we'll use it," Wallace said. "It's fairly small as exceptions go. It's just one more piece to have. When you look at the restrictions around it, the probability is we won't use it."
The Grizzlies, who have until March 5th to use the exception, can only use it to trade for a player in the final year of his contract.