NBA free agency live updates (2024)

NBA teams began negotiating with free agents at 6 p.m. ET on Sunday. The big items so far:

• Donovan Mitchell and the Cavaliers agreed on a 3-year, $150.3 million extension, with a third-year player option.
• Klay Thompson is planning to sign with the Dallas Mavericks.
• The Boston Celtics are for sale.
• Jayson Tatum's new five-year contract extension will be the largest in NBA history.
• Paul George will sign a four-year contract with the Philadelphia 76ers.
• Chris Paul will sign with the San Antonio Spurs, where he'll pair with Victor Wembanyama.
• LeBron James intends to opt out of his $51.4 million player option for 2024-25, but the expectation is he'll return to L.A. on a new deal.

Follow here for news and analysis on all the free-agency movement this summer.

San Antonio’s addition of Chris Paul might seem a bit odd, given that the Spurs are rebuilding and Paul is 39 years old. Even given the team’s need at point guard, other targets were available, and San Antonio had the money to chase them — most notably Tyus Jones, brother of incumbent point guard Tre Jones.

However, there may be something here beyond the long-term lovefest between Gregg Popovich and CP3. By signing Paul to a one-year deal, San Antonio gives itself the chance to profit from his contract twice. Paul will be an expiring deal come February, at which time Spurs could either aggregate it if they wanted to use their cache of future picks to hunt for a big star or sell off less dramatically for a second-round pick or two if he’s playing well and the Spurs are out of the hunt.

It’s perhaps not the most dramatic thing the Spurs could have done, and their offseason still feels incomplete pending other moves. But Paul was possibly the best player they could have brought in at that position, the money is reasonable and the contract is highly portable.

Phoenix has painted itself into an impossible corner, and it seems likely the only way out will inevitably be trading Kevin Durant and Devin Booker, whether that’s at the 2025 trade deadline or 18 months from now. Nonetheless, as long as the Suns are putting up the good fight of trying to stay in contention, they played their hand about as well as they could.

Mason Plumlee was the best center they could have brought in on a minimum deal and an upgrade on the departed Drew Eubanks. Re-signing Bol Bol and (eventually) Josh Okogie at raises on their minimum deals keeps their two best internal improvement candidates in the mix.

As for Royce O’Neale’s deal? Not great, Bob. Four years and $44 million for a 31-year-old player is a big chunk of change. But the Bird rights trap bites hardest on second-apron teams like the Suns that have no means of replacing the player for more than the minimum. O’Neale almost had to come back, and the Suns had zero leverage.

The endgame of this is staggering: The Suns will have the league’s most expensive roster this year and likely will in 2025-26 too. They will have their 2032 and 2033 draft picks frozen for being over the second apron and will have the 2032 pick moved to the end of the first round if they can’t get under the second apron by 2026.

But for now, at least, they’re alive — just barely — in the contender conversation once again.

You’re not really a Nuggets shooting guard until you move to Central Florida. Caldwell-Pope followed the well-trod path worn by Gary Harris, Arron Afflalo, Evan Fournier, R.J. Hampton and Von Wafter when he agreed to the previously mentioned deal with the Magic.

Orlando also agreed to bring back Harris to a two-year, $14 million that could come out of its room exception and secured Goga Bitadze on a three-year, $25 million deal that will be signed once the rest of its cap space is gone, because he only has a $2 million cap hold.

The Magic still have roughly $25 million in cap room left, and one thing they might do is renegotiate-and-extend Jonathan Isaac’s contract with part of it. Doing so, rather than a standard extension, would push more money into the present and take it out of future seasons when likely max extensions for Franz Wagner and Paolo Banchero will make the Magic’s roster more expensive.

My BORD$ formula has a $15 million valuation on Isaac, and he’s 26 years, old, so let’s start there. Suppose you wanted to give him that money over three years, for a total of $45 million, in a contract extension.

In Orlando’s situation, it makes more sense to drop as much of that money into this season as possible by using cap space in a renegotiate-and-extend. You could do that by using $6.5 million of cap room to give Isaac a raise to $23.5 million from his current $17 million, then drop his salary by the maximally allowed 40 percent the next season to just $14.1 million. With 8 percent declines in the following two seasons, his salary would be $13 million in 2026-27 and $11.9 million in 2027-28, for a total package of $45.5 million in new money.

With the money left over after that, the Magic could still use another shot-creating guard. If nothing emerges, however, don’t be shocked if they use the cap room on a one-year overpay with a team option for 2025-26, effectively keeping the money alive as a trade exception to take into this season or next offseason.

Time will tell whether it’s enough, but the Mavericks definitely upgraded their offensive potency with the additions of Naji Marshall and Klay Thompson after the Boston Celtics exposed their lack of perimeter threats in the NBA Finals.

There was an equal and opposite cost, as the Mavs lost Derrick Jones Jr. and Josh Green and may suffer at the defensive end because of it. Nonetheless, the idea of putting Thompson in the weakside corner on a Luka Dončić–Dereck Lively II pick-and-roll was likely too salivating to reasonably resist, especially when it only cost them one second-round pick. (Charlotte supplied the other one.)

Marshall also is an underrated addition as a smart two-way player who isn’t as threatening a standstill shooter but has more juice as a ballhandler and general havoc-maker. His contract (three years, $27 million) rivals Melton’s as the best-value deal of this cycle so far.

Again, hard choices had to be made. The Mavs had to surrender Green to stay under the first apron after already giving up draft equity to turn Tim Hardaway Jr. into Quentin Grimes. On paper, though, it’s hard to see tougher playoff lineup in the West than this one.

The Oklahoma City Thunder didn’t get a superstar or a secondary shot creator to open up their playoff offense, but they did the best they could have with their cap space and assets, using room to get the best attainable player for them on the market (Isaiah Hartenstein), declining options on Isaiah Joe and Aaron Wiggins to lock them in on longer deals at team-friendly numbers and dealing Josh Giddey for Alex Caruso.

Once they extend Caruso in six months, they’ll have a multi-year window with a core of the above players, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Chet Holmgren, Jalen Williams and Luguentz Dort. If Cason Wallace, Nikola Topić or one of their many future draft picks can join the party, so much the better.

Watching the Thunder play crunchtime of their most important game of the season with two bigs underscored that playing five-out and spamming guard-guard screens wasn’t a 48-minute panacea against every opponent. Hartenstein, in particular, helps two glaring weaknesses — the lack of a decisive short-roller and the team’s pitiful rebounding.

More importantly, the money on the deals of Joe, Wiggins and Hartenstein gives the Thunder a very important currency: tradeable salary. One of the barriers to using their surfeit of future draft choices in a future deal was that they had no plausible means of exchanging one of them for an A-lister because they didn’t have the necessary salary match on hand. Now they do.

To that end: We’re still learning the details, but I would strongly expect a third-year team option on Hartenstein’s deal. The Thunder don’t necessarily want to be paying Holmgren a max and Hartenstein $30 million in the same season in 2026-27, and an option year essentially gives them a two-year window where Hartenstein is plausibly expiring money for a receiving team.

Similarly, let’s see where the guaranteed money ends up on Wiggins’ deal. He was locked in for one year at $2 million, so giving him an extra four years and $45 million on top of that seems pretty extreme for a fungible, fringe-rotation guy who is likely to get lapped by incoming draft picks.

However, if the out years are either non-guarantees or team options, that has the impact of turning the contract into a trade exception that’s usable at whatever moment the Thunder need it. Going that route is far more effective than just locking in the money and then sitting there in 2027 wondering why this guy is on the cap for two more years.

Similarly, the Warriors finally acknowledged the reality that had been slapping them in the face for the last two seasons. They completed the second half of the Jordan Poole salary dump (and what a save that was) by waiving Paul’s non-guaranteed $30 million deal, then let Thompson go and agreed to a deal with De’Anthony Melton in his stead.

This seems more jarring optically than it is in pure basketball terms. The Warriors replaced Thompson with a better, younger player who cost less, then got a $16 million trade exception and two second-round picks. This can’t be seen as anything other than a giant win, with the biggest potential snag being that they get “DiVincenzo’d” next summer if Melton outplays his one-year contract and they have no Bird rights on him.

But it’s only a win because of where the Warriors were — stuck with an old, expensive core and no longer able to buy their way out of it. The more nagging question is: What, exactly, do they do from here? The Warriors have a middling-to-good team in an awesome conference, which is how they won 46 games last year and still missed the playoffs. A similar outcome seems highly plausible again.

The hardest part is Golden State is no longer good enough to contend but not quite bad enough for conscience-free tanking. Additionally, the Warriors’ best player is arguably the biggest needle-mover of the last decade for fans and TV. If you’re playing Football Manager with this roster, trading Curry for a giant heap of assets and starting over is the no-brainer move. If you’re running a team in real life, it’s unthinkable.

Philadelphia is in a very interesting situation as it tries to build the rest of its roster because the Sixers have some under-the-radar cap options.

The most obvious are either waiving Paul Reed to use $9.3 million in room to sign a player or trading Reed’s non-guaranteed $7.7 million deal for a player making up to about $15 million and being hard-capped at the first apron.

In either of those scenarios, the Sixers would sign second-round pick Adem Bona to the minimum, sign Tyrese Maxey’s five-year max contract, sign Kelly Oubre with the room exception, and then fill out the roster with veteran minimum contracts.

However, careful observers will note that Oubre doesn’t necessarily need to go into the room exception … and further, that Andre Drummond’s new contract happens to be the for the exact amount of the taxpayer midlevel exception. In other words, Drummond and Oubre could swap places in the cap sheet.

Why would that possibly matter? Because it would let the Sixers spend up to the second tax apron rather than the first. And that’s a plausible outcome because forward K.J. Martin has a $2.08 million cap hold but the Sixers have full Bird rights on him.

Thus, Philadelphia could waive Reed, keep Martin on the books, use cap space for Oubre’s deal, and spend $5.1 million in cap room on another player or players. Then, when they’re done using room, they could sign Martin to a one-year deal worth up to $19.7 million (any more would push them past the second apron) with a second-year team option, essentially using his contract as an in-season trade chip similar to how Indiana did Bruce Brown’s deal last summer.

The Sixers would be hard-capped at the second apron rather than the first apron in this scenario and could trade Martin for any player making less than that $19.7 million amount.

The Harden trade really has a different spin now, huh? The Sixers got two first-rounders, two second-rounders, a pick swap and stuffed P.J. Tucker’s dead money into the deal too. Then, summer came and they ended up with the cap space to pluck George off LA’s roster.

It’s a huge win for the Sixers’ strategy of leaning into cap space once the implications of the new CBA became apparent, even in an environment where nearly all the best players sign extensions. It was a high-wire dance and a gamble they only narrowly won. If George hadn’t signed, there was no alternate player even remotely good enough to justify max-level money, and the Sixers’ cap-room window would have effectively shut once Tyrese Maxey signed his five-year max deal.

But it did work, and on Philly’s timeline, it’s extremely important. We don’t know how long Joel Embiid’s body will hold up, but he’s one of the league’s best players right now and has an All-Star sidekick in Maxey. George is 34 and will miss regular-season games, but he’s always been a near-ideal third star, somebody who can make open shots, defend good players and scale his shot creation up or down as the situation requires.

The biggest risk here is that George’s play goes south in the final two years of his deal, but by that point, his contract becomes a massive salary match to be used in concert with those firsts. Two years from now, the Sixers can put four firsts in a trade to make godfather offers with George’s contract if they want. In the bizarro logic of Apronworld, getting that third big contract in the first place is half the challenge.

The Sixers are by no means a sure thing to even be the second-best team in the Eastern Conference; they have much work left to build out a viable rotation. Kelly Oubre, Eric Gordon and Andre Drummond will help. Signing a starting-caliber four with their remaining $9.3 million in cap space would aid mightily, too. In the end, Philly might be a little too thin to beat Boston and New York, but it’s still a heck of a lot better than what it had before.

It’s one thing to resist the depredations of the tax aprons in 2024. It’s another to be skirting the tax for years. That’s what Denver has been doing even while it has the best player who will ever wear the franchise’s uniform in his prime.

Amid Nikola Jokić MVP seasons, the Nuggets have spent half a decade cheaping out by trading draft picks to dump salaries and skimping on contracts to avoid or minimize the luxury tax. They still managed to win a championship despite this, but this isn’t how you max out what should be a golden era in Denver. It is Lame with a capital L.

Losing Kentavious Caldwell-Pope to a ridiculous, bloaty offer would have been one thing. Losing him to a three-year $66 million deal is embarrassing. The Nuggets could have either matched that and stayed right at the second apron or had him opt-in for his $15.4 million player option for this season and built a three-year extension off that.

Denver’s past roster sins ended up costing it: An overpay to JaMychal Green eventually cost the Nuggets a 2027 first-round pick in a stealth salary dump, for instance, and a baffling midlevel deal for Reggie Jackson in 2023 cost them three seconds to dispatch.

Bigger picture, though, the contract extensions did the Nuggets in. They had a Stan Kroenke budget but acted like their owner was Steve Ballmer, breezily committing to max extensions for Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr. without much of a fight (especially the latter) and giving little-used Zeke Nnaji a ridiculous (and virtually untradeable) four-year, $32 million extension a year ago.

Partly as a result of past sins, Denver has no tradeable draft picks. The Nuggets can do picks swaps in 2026, 2028 and 2030, if available, and can deal a 2031 first-rounder — conditional on them even having the pick to trade.

They’re stuck, basically hoping one or two late draft picks can turn into something beyond an “interesting” bench piece. The Joker Era deserves better.

For instance, the Clippers’ unwillingness to give George a four-year max at age 34 is defensible in a vacuum and might be more so if they can turn his departure to Philadelphia into a sign-and-trade that generates a $50 million trade exception. There are limits on how to use an exception of that size in our brave new tax-apron world, but it’s still significant.

The Clippers are also adding Derrick Jones, Kris Dunn and Nic Batum, as well as Kevin Porter Jr. (The fact the Clippers felt they had to resort to this move underscores their talent-addition challenges; Porter’s past locker-room demeanor and off-court issues are both red flags, in my opinion.)

LA, however, is positioned to fight another day, sitting below the tax apron with expiring money, and could even be a cap room team a year from now. (Keep an eye also on an extension for Ivica Zubac, which can run up to four years and $78 million.) Meanwhile, the candle is burning out on a Leonard-Harden core, and the Clippers don’t control their next five drafts. That’s a tough environment to be much more than average.

James Wiseman is headed to Indiana.

The free-agent center has agreed to a two-year deal with the Pacers, a league source confirmed to The Athletic on Tuesday. Wiseman, 23, was the No. 2 pick in the 2020 NBA Draft, which also included his soon-to-be teammates Obi Toppin (No. 8), Tyrese Haliburton (No. 12) and Aaron Nesmith (No. 14). ESPN first reported the deal.

Wiseman presumably replaces Jalen Smith, who left Indiana in free agency and reportedly agreed to join the Bulls on a three-year, $27 million deal. Wiseman will have the chance to compete for Indiana’s backup center role alongside 2021 first-round pick Isaiah Jackson.

Since entering the NBA, Wiseman has not become the star player the Warriors envisioned when they drafted him right after Minnesota chose now two-time All-Star Anthony Edwards first overall in 2020. Wiseman was a member of Golden State’s championship team in 2021-22, though he was sidelined for the entire season due to a knee injury. He was eventually traded mid-season to the Pistons in February 2023. Last season, Wiseman appeared in a career-high 63 regular-season games for Detroit and averaged 7.1 points and 5.3 rebounds in just over 17 minutes per contest.

The details of Wiseman’s contract have not been disclosed, though it likely won’t be worth very much. This is simply a low-risk decision with a potentially high reward for Indiana. Haliburton’s ascension as arguably the NBA’s best pass-first point guard has helped him bring the best out of his teammates, like Toppin and Nesmith, who’ve switched teams and thrived with the Pacers. Wiseman could be next in line.

Call it the end of the exceptionalism era. No longer can the biggest markets and richest owners play by their own sets of rules while the rest of the NBA scrambles to keep up in the arms race.

The first 36 hours or so of free agency emphatically hammered that point home, with the richest bluebloods seeming to take the hardest hits. In particular, the three elite teams of the West Coast — the Los Angeles Lakers, LA Clippers and Golden State Warriors — all saw the combination of this year’s cap apron rules and next year’s punitive repeater tax seem to snuff out their last hopes of true title contention.

Those three teams have entered every season for the last half decade with a championship-or-bust mantra, but already the writing was on the wall that the future would be harder. They combined to win three playoff games last season, and their best three players are 39 (LeBron James), 36 (Stephen Curry) and 33 (Kawhi Leonard).

Remember, it was less than six months ago that the Clippers were looking like a title team, tearing through the league with a 32-9 mark in a 41-game early-season stretch. Leonard was healthy, a trade of James Harden added a jolt of shot creation and the West seemed wide open. As for the Lakers and Warriors, they aspired to similar heights, having met in a second-round playoff series in 2023 after the Lakers won the title in 2020 and Golden State in 2022.

These last two days, however, have slammed shut a series of possible doorways back to contention. The Clippers lost Paul George to free agency without compensation, the Warriors couldn’t turn Chris Paul’s contract or Klay Thompson’s free agency into an impact player and the Lakers haven’t made a single notable addition despite the willingness of LeBron James to take a pay cut.

In a second-apron environment, you can’t just throw money at your problems. None of these teams had the assets or cap flexibility to materially improve their situations. They’re not the only ones, incidentally — Denver, Phoenix, Milwaukee, Miami and others are learning the same. But they stand out the most because we’ve become inured to their exceptionalism — that whatever rules we apply to most teams don’t necessarily apply to them. In the most recent collective bargaining agreement, that is no longer true. If the Clippers and Warriors want to go $50 million into the tax, there are real consequences.

It’s not just which players the Dallas Mavericks have pursued and lost in free agency, but how.

In the past decade or so, they’ve had offseason targets announce they wouldn’t be signing with Dallas on Snapchat, on podcasts, on finalist lists that didn’t include them. They’ve missed out on stars who joined years later, shells of their former selves, as some sick consolation prize. They’ve seen an agent persuade his client to take fractions of the amount they had offered to reach free agency sooner. They’ve broken up the franchise’s only championship roster in 2011 in failed aspirations of super-team glory.

On Monday, Dallas agreed to sign Klay Thompson. A four-time champion, someone who might not be the player he once was, but a statement nevertheless: This franchise is wholly different from before.

I can confirm the Pacers have agreed to a two-year deal with FA C James Wiseman. ESPN was first.

Wiseman, 23, was the No. 2 pick in the 2020 draft, which also featured his soon-to-be teammates Obi Toppin (No. 8), Tyrese Haliburton (No. 12) and Aaron Nesmith (No. 14).

The substantial relationship fracturing that led to this split points the microscope at upper management. Controlling owner Joe Lacob led a front-office effort to take a cold, mostly uncommunicative approach to Thompson's next contract in his three summers of extension eligibility, team sources said, which isn't separate from their norm. Lacob has done similar in the past with Curry, Kerr, Bob Myers, Andre Iguodala and Green, using dwindling time as a weapon but ultimately paying up (he put a substantial offer on the table for Myers) after a staring contest.

But Iguodala's (in 2017) and Green's (in 2023) are the two parallel situations that have popped up most in conversation about the split with Thompson that blindsided some Warriors' executives in recent weeks. Iguodala and Green, both sharp and versed in the corporate world, used leverage to exact a better deal from the Warriors. Iguodala took his decision deep into free agency.

Thompson operates on his own wavelength. The Warriors' decision-makers were warned that a drawn-out negotiation into July during this free-agent cycle wouldn't be met the same way. He wasn't trying to leverage his way back until the bitter end. After a bumpy end to a grumpy year, there was a realistic chance he went searching for a fresh start and more happiness elsewhere, regardless of how rapidly and warmly the Warriors prioritized him.

But his decision, as one source put it, became easy when the Warriors kicked him down the summer pecking order. They paid a record luxury-tax bill last season and didn't make the playoffs, a cost-versus-benefit that is untenable. So Joe Lacob, Mike Dunleavy, Kirk Lacob and their front office set off this offseason to explore big-picture moves that could vault them into contention and salary-slicing moves that were more reasonable.

There was little communication between Thompson, the Warriors and Thompson's agent, Greg Lawrence, and ultimately no offer in this cycle. Warriors sources maintained a plan to eventually make a competitive offer in relation to his market once other business was settled. But they never had the chance. Many league sources said Thompson's decision to depart was unofficially made weeks ago.

It's too early to write the Lakers off, of course. There's always a chance they pull a rabbit out of a hat with a trade or signing. They have been active in recent days, discussing potential deals with Portland, Brooklyn and Utah, among other teams, according to league and team sources. Vice president of basketball operations and general manager Rob Pelinka tends to operate in the shadows — more so this summer than ever, according to league sources. It's certainly possible he has a contingency plan that saves the offseason.

But the Lakers are running out of time. Free agents are flying off the board. Teams are making moves that will tie up their cap space and make it harder to trade. James wants to have his contract situation resolved by the start of the Team USA Olympics practice on Saturday in Las Vegas. That's an unofficial deadline for Los Angeles, at least on the free-agency front.

It's reaching the point where the Lakers need to do something — and sooner than later.

The LA Clippers were confident publicly that they could retain All-Star small forward Paul George, even if he reached unrestricted free agency. They had certain advantages in hand: a relationship that extended five years, a close partnership with fellow All-Star and future Hall of Famer Kawhi Leonard, a stable head coaching situation, a new arena in George’s hometown, even new jerseys from George’s chosen childhood team.

What the Clippers also had was the opportunity to pay George for four years and $221.1 million. That was about $9 million more than any other team could offer him on a four-year deal. They also could have given him a no-trade clause.

Plan A for the Clippers involved retaining George on a similar contract to what Leonard agreed to in January 2024: three years, just over $152 million. George could have accepted an extension as early as September 2023. Instead, extension talks were tabled in February until after the season. When the Clippers were eliminated by the Dallas Mavericks in May, it seemed likely that George would opt out.