Nets guard Spencer Dinwiddie continues to recover from a partially torn ACL and won’t have to make a decision on his 2021-22 player option until the end of July, but he sounds fairly confident he’ll be turning that option down. Dinwiddie said as much during a conversation with Shlomo Sprung of Forbes.
“I’m gonna be more than healthy by the time free agency starts, so just from a dollars perspective you kind of have to,” said Dinwiddie, whose option would pay him about $12.3M. “$12 million isn’t market value for a starting point guard. It’s probably about half, $20-25. So obviously it’s pretty concrete that I’m gonna opt out.”
Sprung points to Fred VanVleet and Malcolm Brogdon as point guards who have signed contracts worth more than $20M annually in the last two years. Both of those players were 26 years old when they reached free agency, whereas Dinwiddie will be a couple years older and will be coming off a major injury.
Still, Dinwiddie matches up favorably with VanVleet and Brogdon from a statistical perspective, having averaged 20.6 points and 6.8 assists in 64 games (31.2 MPG) in 2019-20. The 28-year-old also believes he’ll be fully healthy well before the 2021-22 season begins, telling Sprung that he has had “one of the more successful ACL recoveries in history and that he’s still hoping to make it back during the playoffs — perhaps in late June.
Even if Dinwiddie isn’t able to return in June or July, he doesn’t necessarily believe he has played his last game with the Nets. He tells Sprung that he’d be interested in working out a new deal with Brooklyn if and when he opts out.
“If Brooklyn wants to use my Bird Rights and sign me, I’d be thankful to be back and be able to go and try to win, hopefully, a second championship,” Dinwiddie said. “And if not, then as an unrestricted free agent you can kinda choose where you wanna go. It’s an interesting situation to be in.”
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