Story by
With the stroke of midnight, Nick Richards has his Heat season-long guarantee
- Story by
- With the stroke of midnight, Nick Richards has his Heat season-long guarantee
MIAMI — The deadline was passive. With the stroke of midnight, Nick Richards found himself early Wednesday set for the season with the Miami Heat. At least from a financial perspective.
Unlike most in the league at the NBA's Monday 5 p.m. personnel deadline , Richards had a unique guarantee date with the one-year free-agent deal he signed at the veteran's minimum this offseason. More to the point, the Heat had a deadline of 11:59 p.m. Tuesday, the day before the team's season opener.
Advertisement
With the deadline passing, Richard now is guaranteed $3,066,143 for the season. Because the NBA pay scale does not penalize teams for carrying older players, the hit for the 28-year-old veteran against the Heat's salary cap, luxury tax and hard cap will be the standard $2,449,421 for all players on one-year minimum-scale deals.
Richards was the lone guarantee decision the Heat faced ahead of Wednesday night's season opener against the Minnesota Timberwolves at Kaseya Center.
The next guarantee deadline the Heat will face will come in late November, when the guaranteed $500,000 portion of Myron Gardner's partially guaranteed deal reaches that threshold.
For the Heat, it all is part of a delicate dance created by becoming hard capped due to the machinations utilized in the offseason acquisition of Giannis Antetokounmpo .
Advertisement
While the Heat have enough space left under their hard cap to sign an addition player and reach the NBA maximum of 15 under standard contract, the waiting game leaves funds available below their hard cap to either sign a player on the buyout market, claim a player at the minimum on the waiver wire or utilize in a trade.
By carrying only 14 players on standard deals, there is an ancillary impact when it comes to the team's three players under two-way contracts: Tre Donaldson, Vlad Goldin and Keshad Johnson.
Typically, players on two-way contracts (deals that pay half the veteran minimum) each can be active for 50 of the 82 regular-season games. However, when a team has fewer than the maximum 15 players under standard contract, the total combined games on the active list of a team's two-way players cannot exceed 90.
With the Heat largely healthy to start the season, the impact of that twist with two-way players is not expected to have much of an impact.
Advertisement
As for Richards, with his guarantee now in place, the question is whether he will have an impact, considering the majority of the minutes in the Heat's power rotation are expected to be split between Antetokounmpo, Bam Adebayo and Bobby Portis.
As with many on the lower tiers of the pay scale caught in the NBA's salary squeeze, Richards has stepped back in paygrade, after having earned $5 million in each of the previous three seasons.
He is one of several Heat players who have had to step back in the NBA's still-lucrative salary dynamic. Tim Hardaway Jr., who earned $16.2 million two seasons ago with the Detroit Pistons, is earning $6.1 million this season. Simone Fontecchio went from last season's $8.3 million Heat salary to a $2.6 million Heat salary this season. And Johnson went from last season's $2 million standard contract to the two-way deal that will pay him $679,000 this season.
Related Articles
Advertisement
Even with the pay cut, Richards earning his spot came with a buy-in, one coach Erik Spoelstra said has proven tangible for the big man listed at 6 feet 11, 225 pounds.
"He's in great shape," Spoelstra said, with the Heat next going from Wednesday night's opener to a Friday night home game against the Detroit Pistons. "So I think when you look at him physically, he already looks like a different player than he did last year. And that's allowing him to make more plays, more offensive rebounds, more pursuits, better sprints in the open court.
"And he's acclimating very quickly to how we want to defend and pick and rolls. It gives us a different coverage than the other bigs. And even with the weight that he's lost, he's a big big, which we feel like we need for our roster."
