Pelicans free agent combo forward Herbert Jones is set to re-sign with New Orleans, his Priority Sports agents Mark Bartelstein and Kieran Piller inform Adrian Wojnarowski and Andrew Lopez of ESPN (Twitter link).
New Orleans Jones turned down a cheaper team option for 2023-24 to ink the 6-foot-8 forward to a fresh new four-year, $54M contract, which is the Early Bird maximum the team can offer. In making him an unrestricted free agent, the club probably had a pretty good idea that the third-year player would accept the agreement.
Christian Clark of NOLA.com reports (via Twitter) that the deal is fully guaranteed.
A rival team could have theoretically offered him a back-loaded Arenas provision offer sheet, which the Pelicans would have been able to match. This four-year, $54M deal represented the most New Orleans they could offer the 24-year-old directly.
Bobby Marks of ESPN tweets that Jones will net $12M in the first season of the new contract, adding that his new contract now pushes the Pelicans $4.5M into the league’s luxury tax. Worth monitoring now is how the club will handle the non-guaranteed $5.4M deal of veteran New Orleans shooting guard Garrett Temple for 2023-24, which would become fully guaranteed on July 7.
Jones immediately emerged as a versatile defensive option for a playoff-bound Pelicans club during his first season out of Alabama and was named to the 2021-22 All-Rookie Second Team for his superlative efforts.
Last year, he averaged 9.8 PPG, 4.1 RPG, 2.5 APG, 1.6 SPG and 0.6 BPG across 66 games, all starts, for a 42-40 New Orleans club.
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