Thunder granted disabled player exception

The Oklahoma City Thunder have been awarded a disabled player exception as a result of Thomas Sorber‘s season-ending knee surgery, according to Eric Pincus of Bleacher Report.

An NBA team becomes eligible for a disabled player exception when one of its players suffers an injury that is considered more likely than not to sideline him through June 15 of that league year. It doesn’t grant the team an extra roster spot, but generates some additional cap flexibility. The exception can be used to acquire a player on an expiring contract via trade or waiver claim, or to sign a free agent to a one-year contract.

The value of the disabled player exception is equivalent to either the non-taxpayer mid-level exception or half of the injured player’s salary, whichever is lesser. In this case, Sorber’s cap hit is a relatively modest $4,655,040, so the DPE is worth $2,327,520.

Teams will have until March 10 to use their disabled player exceptions, and most of them expire without being used. That’s especially true when they’re worth as little as the Thunder’s new one and when a team has more versatile exceptions like the mid-level on hand.

Still, there are certain scenarios in which that small DPE could come in handy, such as signing a player to a rest-of-season contract worth more than the minimum later in the season, or trading for a player with a low cap hit who can’t be acquired using the minimum salary exception.

Sorber, the 15th overall pick in the 2025 draft, tore his ACL during a workout last month. It will be the second year in a row that a Thunder first-round pick has missed his rookie season due to an ACL tear — Nikola Topic did the same thing in 2024-25, though Oklahoma City knew about that injury before drafting him.