Saturday, September 11 is the last day that NBA teams can waive players and use the stretch provision to spread their 2021-22 cap hits across three seasons, as Bobby Marks of ESPN notes (via Twitter). The stretch provision allows teams to gain some short-term relief at the cost of reduced long-term flexibility.
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In a normal NBA league year, the last day to stretch a player’s current salary would be August 31, but that deadline was pushed back by 11 days to account for the fact that free agency began at the start of August rather than the start of July.
After Saturday, a player who is released between September 12 and the end of the season can have his cap hit(s) in 2022-23 and future years stretched, assuming he’s owed guaranteed money beyond this season. But his ’21-22 cap charge will remain unchanged unless he reaches a buyout agreement with his team.
As Marks observes, this may end up being the first time since the stretch provision was introduced in 2011 that not a single NBA team utilizes the stretch provision between the start of the league year and the late-summer deadline.
In every other recent offseason, at least three players have had their cap hits stretched after being waived (Twitter link via Marks). This year, teams like the Thunder (Kemba Walker) and Pistons (DeAndre Jordan), who waived players with pricey cap hits for the next two years, could have stretched out the dead money, but opted to keep those salaries confined to the next two seasons rather than spreading them across five years.
However, there are still some situations worth keeping an eye on in advance of Saturday’s deadline, especially for clubs over the luxury tax line.
For instance, we haven’t heard yet whether the Nets plan to stretch Jahlil Okafor‘s $2.13M cap hit after cutting him on Thursday. Doing so would result in a projected $6.7M in tax savings for Brooklyn in 2021-22, Marks tweets. However, the team will likely be well over the tax line for multiple years and may prefer to just eat Okafor’s dead money this season rather than having to account for $710K cap hits for three years.
Outside of Brooklyn, the NBA’s current projected taxpayers are the Warriors, Clippers, Bucks, Jazz, Lakers, Sixers, Celtics, and Trail Blazers. If any of those teams intends to waive a player who is owed guaranteed money for 2021-22, now might be the time to do it, in order to spread out that player’s cap hit and reduce this season’s tax bill.
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