- Chris Duarte said he was caught off guard when the Pacers traded him to the Kings, according to Jason Anderson of the Sacramento Bee. “I was surprised,” Duarte said. “I was at home with the family when I received a call. This is how the business works. … This is a great team, great franchise, great fan base. I’ve seen videos of how loud the fans get, so I love that.” The Kings gave up two second-round picks for Duarte, who battled an ankle injury last season.
Coby White‘s new contract with the Bulls and Trey Lyles‘ new contract with the Kings both include unlikely incentives that could increase the value of those deals, Hoops Rumors has learned.
White’s three-year pact is guaranteed to be worth at least $36MM and has $1.3MM in annual incentives that could push the guard’s earnings up to $40MM in total. As for Lyles, he’ll make $8MM guaranteed salaries in each season of his two-year deal with Sacramento and could earn another $1.2MM in bonuses, which would increase the overall value of the contract to $18.4MM ($9.2MM per year).
Here are a few more details worth noting on several recently signed contracts:
- Aaron Holiday‘s one-year, minimum-salary contract with the Rockets is only partially guaranteed. Holiday is assured of about $1.05MM and would receive his full $2.35MM salary if he remains under contract through at least January 7.
- Draymond Green‘s four-year, $100MM contract with the Warriors includes a 15% trade kicker, while Jevon Carter‘s three-year, $19.5MM deal with the Bulls has a third-year player option.
- Only the first season of Julian Champagnie‘s new four-year, $12MM contract with the Spurs is guaranteed. For each of the following three years, he’ll have to remain under contract beyond August 1 to guarantee his salary for that season.
- A player who re-signs with his previous team on a one-year deal (or a two-year deal with a second-year option) has the right to veto a trade, since he’d lose his Bird (or Early Bird) rights if he’s dealt. However, the new Collective Bargaining Agreement allows a player to waive that right to veto a trade when he signs that sort of contract, and Lakers guard D’Angelo Russell became the first player to do so, per Keith Smith of Spotrac (Twitter link). Alex Len also waived his right to veto a trade as part of his new one-year deal with the Kings, Hoops Rumors has learned.
The Kings’ renegotiation and extension of Domantas Sabonis‘ contract includes $203.6MM in guaranteed money, Michael Scotto of Hoops Hype tweets. The five-year deal also includes $13MM in incentives, raising its potential value to $216.6MM.
Sacramento used $8.6MM in cap room to give Sabonis a raise on next season’s salary – from $22MM to $30.6MM — then added four more years via the extension.
We have more contract-related notes:
- Khris Middleton has a player option in the final season of his new three-year deal with the Bucks, Scotto tweets. As previously reported, his contract includes $93MM in guaranteed money and another $9MM in bonus incentives.
- Fred VanVleet‘s huge three-year contract with the Rockets includes a 15% trade kicker, according to Blake Murphy of Sportsnet (Twitter link). The previously reported team option for the third year is valued at $44.89MM.
- D’Angelo Russell‘s two-year contract with the Lakers is guaranteed for $36MM, Spotrac contributor Keith Smith tweets. The second season is a player option and Russell has $700K in incentives for both seasons. Additionally, Russell has waived his implied no-trade clause.
- Jaylen Clark‘s two-way contract with the Timberwolves is a two-year deal, Smith tweets.
- Leonard Miller‘s four-year, $8.3MM contract with the Timberwolves is guaranteed for the first two years, Scotto tweets. The third year is 50% guaranteed, and the fourth year is a team option.
- Neemias Queta is willing to accept a two-way contract for the third straight season if it keeps him on the Kings‘ roster, according to Jason Anderson of The Sacramento Bee. Queta is currently a restricted free agent after receiving a $2MM qualifying offer from the team last month. That QO only includes a small partial guarantee.
The NBA has announced the five-team groups that will used for the league’s first-ever in-season tournament, writes Tim Bontemps of ESPN. The unveiling took place Saturday during a special episode of ESPN’s “NBA Today” held at “NBA Con” in Las Vegas.
The groups were determined in a draw similar to what is used in soccer’s World Cup. There are six groups — three each from the Eastern Conference and Western Conference — and each conference was split into five pots based on last season’s standings. One team was randomly selected from each of the pots to determine the opening-round matchups.
The results are:
- Group 1: Sixers, Cavaliers, Hawks, Pacers and Pistons.
- Group 2: Bucks, Knicks, Heat, Wizards and Hornets.
- Group 3: Celtics, Nets, Raptors, Bulls and Magic.
- Group 4: Grizzlies, Suns, Lakers, Jazz and Trail Blazers.
- Group 5: Nuggets, Clippers, Pelicans, Mavericks and Rockets.
- Group 6: Kings, Warriors, Timberwolves, Thunder and Spurs.
The tournament will start with group play, which will match each team with the other four in its grouping. Those games will take place on Nov. 3, 10, 14, 17, 21, 24 and 28.
The winner of each group will advance to a knockout round, joined by the team with the best record in each conference among those who didn’t win a group. Quarterfinal games will be played Dec. 4 and 5, hosted by the higher-seeded teams. The four winners in that round will move on to T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas for the Dec. 7 semifinals and the Dec. 9 championship game.
Bontemps points out that all teams will play within their conference until the last game, which guarantees an East vs. West matchup, just like the NBA Finals.
“Everybody’s not going to buy in right away,” admitted Joe Dumars, the NBA’s executive vice president of basketball operations. “So that can’t be the goal that everybody’s going to buy in from day one. These things take time. And I think, as time goes on, I think you can build this up and people can really get into it.”
The championship trophy will be called the NBA Cup, and players will receive $500K each for winning it. Other prize money includes $200K for second place, $100K for losing in the semifinals and $50K for losing in the quarterfinals. The league opted not to provide other incentives, such as a guaranteed playoff spot, for the tournament winner.
We passed along more details on the in-season tournament right here.
The Kings have waived guard PJ Dozier, the team announced today in a press release.
The move doesn’t come as a real surprise, given that Dozier played a limited role for Sacramento last season and would have had his $2.41MM salary for 2023/24 become guaranteed if he remained under contract beyond Monday, July 10. By cutting him today, the club won’t be on the hook for any of that money.
Dozier, 26, signed a pair of 10-day contracts with the Kings in January before reaching a rest-of-season deal with the team in February. He appeared in 16 games, averaging 1.4 points and 0.9 rebounds in just 4.9 minutes per night.
With Dozier off the roster, the Kings now have 13 players on standard contracts (once Sasha Vezenkov and Alex Len officially sign) and a pair on two-way deals, so they’re presumably not done making moves.
Longtime NBA center Dwight Howard was out of the league during the 2022/23 season, which he spent in Taiwan. However, he still believes he can be a productive player in an NBA rotation, he said during a wide-ranging interview with Zion Olojede of Complex.com.
“I know that there’s at least 15 to 20 teams that I could play for,” Howard said. “And I know there’s teams that got great starting centers, but I know I could be a great backup center. I know I can provide a team with 25 minutes of dominant basketball. And that’s not even scoring, that’s just playing defense, locking people up, protecting the paint, rebounding, and finishing around the basket. I’ve had my fun in the game. I just want to go out like a champ like I’m supposed to.”
Referencing a June interview in which Howard said he’d love to join the Kings, Olojede asked the three-time Defensive Player of the Year which five teams he believes would be good matches for him.
“Okay, you got Miami Heat. You got obviously, the Lakers. The Warriors,” Howard said. “The Kings. But the Kings, I would say the Kings got a couple centers so they probably wouldn’t. But the Kings. The Hawks. I’m from Atlanta, go back home with the Hawks.”
Here are more odds and ends from around the basketball world:
- Discussing his roster for the upcoming FIBA World Cup for the first time on Friday, Team USA head coach Steve Kerr said he plans to lean heavily on Knicks guard Jalen Brunson and Nets forward Mikal Bridges. As Joe Vardon of The Athletic writes, Kerr envisions Brunson having “a pretty big role” and intends to rely on Bridges defensively to match up against opponents’ high-scoring wings.
- Veteran NBA guard Frank Jackson, who had a brief stint with the Jazz this past season, will continue his career overseas, having signed a deal with French team ASVEL, per a press release. Jackson had appeared in 214 career regular season NBA games since being drafted in 2017.
- Rocco Zikarsky, a 7’3″ Australian big man, has decided to forgo a move to the NCAA in favor of joining the Brisbane Bullets as part of the National Basketball League’s Next Stars program, he tells Jonathan Givony of ESPN. Zikarsky, who will turn 17 next week, won’t be draft-eligible until at least 2025, but is considered one of the world’s best basketball prospects, per Givony.
- John Hollinger of The Athletic doesn’t want to go so far as to call them the “losers” of free agency, but has questions about the offseason moves made so far by the Raptors, Pelicans, Kings, Trail Blazers, and Nuggets.
JULY 7: The Kings have officially renegotiated and extended Sabonis’ contract, the team confirmed in a press release.
JULY 1: The Kings are renegotiating Domantas Sabonis‘ 2023/24 salary and signing him to a long-term contract extension, agents Greg Lawrence and Jason Ranne tell Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN.
Sacramento will use $8.6MM in cap room to give Sabonis a raise on this year’s salary – from $22MM to $30.6MM – and will tack on four new years to his expiring contract. According to Wojnarowski, the deal will be worth $217MM over five total seasons, including $195MM in new money.
There won’t be any team or player options in the new contract, tweets Jason Anderson of The Sacramento Bee.
After being acquired in a blockbuster trade involving Tyrese Haliburton at the 2022 deadline, Sabonis thrived in his first full season in Sacramento, averaging 19.1 points, 7.3 assists, and a league-leading 12.3 rebounds in 34.6 minutes per game across 79 contests despite sustaining an avulsion fracture to his thumb in December.
In addition to earning the third All-Star nod of his career, the 27-year-old made an All-NBA squad for the first time, claiming the center spot on the Third Team. Sabonis and De’Aaron Fox led the Kings to a 48-win season and their first playoff berth since 2006.
Contract renegotiations are rare in the NBA and can only be completed when a team has cap space and intends to increase a player’s salary rather than reducing it. The Kings created additional spending flexibility on draft night by agreeing to send Richaun Holmes to Dallas in a salary-dump trade.
There was some speculation that Sacramento may be preparing to make a run at a top-tier free agent with that extra cap space, but Sacramento has instead focused on its own players, extending Harrison Barnes earlier in the week and agreeing to new deals with Trey Lyles and now Sabonis.
The Kings’ one notable deal with a player who wasn’t on the 2022/23 roster is a three-year, $20MM commitment to EuroLeague MVP Sasha Vezenkov. Vezenkov, who is expected to slot into Sacramento’s room exception, wasn’t technically a free agent since the club held his draft rights.
As Bobby Marks of ESPN notes (via Twitter), without a renegotiated 2023/24 salary, Sabonis would have been eligible for a maximum-salary extension of $138MM over four years. That may not have been enough to prevent him from testing the market in 2024, since he would’ve been eligible for a significantly higher salary – and an extra year – at that point.
Interestingly, the only other NBA player to get a renegotiation and extension since 2017 is Sabonis’ former frontcourt partner in Indiana, Myles Turner, Marks observes (via Twitter). Jazz guard Jordan Clarkson is also expected to join that group.
- A handful of teams using cap room this season have renounced their free agent rights to one or more players in order to maximize their space. According to RealGM’s transaction log, the Pacers (George Hill), Kings (Terence Davis, Jeremy Lamb, Corey Brewer), Pistons (Hamidou Diallo, Rodney McGruder, and Buddy Boeheim), and Thunder (eight players, including Dario Saric, Jared Butler, and Nick Collison) all renounced players. In some cases, those cap holds had been on teams’ books for multiple seasons — they won’t be there going forward.
JULY 6, 8:15pm: The Pacers and Kings have officially completed the trade sending Duarte to Sacramento. The Kings put out a press release confirming the move.
JULY 6, 2:43pm: The Pacers and Kings are in agreement on their Duarte trade, according to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski (Twitter link), who reports that the deal is expected to be finalized today.
Indiana will receive Dallas’ 2028 second-round pick and Sacramento’s own 2030 second-rounder, reports Dustin Dopirak of The Indianapolis Star (Twitter link).
JUNE 30, 9:41am: The Kings and Pacers are nearing an agreement on a trade that will send wing Chris Duarte to Sacramento, sources tell Shams Charania of The Athletic (Twitter link). According to Charania, Indiana would receive draft compensation in the deal.
Duarte, 26, was the 13th overall pick in the 2021 draft out of Oregon. He had a promising rookie season in 2021/22, averaging 13.1 PPG with a .369 3PT% in 55 games (28.0 MPG), but took a step back in his second year in the NBA.
The 6’6″ swingman battled injuries that limited him to 46 games in 2022/23 and his numbers dipped to 7.9 PPG with a .316 3PT%. The emergence of rookie Bennedict Mathurin and the addition of another former lottery pick, Aaron Nesmith, resulted in Duarte playing a diminished role (19.5 MPG) even when he was available.
The Kings appear willing to bet that Duarte can recapture his rookie former and will take on his $4.1MM guaranteed salary for 2023/24. They’ll have to make a decision by October 31 on his $5.9MM option for the ’24/25 season. If that option is picked up, Duarte would become extension-eligible during the 2024 offseason.
The Pacers also reportedly discussed Duarte in their trade talks with the Hawks about De’Andre Hunter.