We are T-Minus 3.5 hours until the NBA Trade Deadline (3pm EST) and the Nuggets have been rumored to be significant players in today’s deadline deals.
The Nuggets have a bucket list of items they’d like to check off today. Moving Emmanuel Mudiay, Wilson Chandler and Kenneth Faried among them. Moves not necessarily designed to improve the on-court product but to ease salary and rotation concerns (finding a spot for Torrey Craig for example.).
The Nuggets, buyers last year to hit the salary floor are suddenly facing cap concerns as there is expected to be a cap crunch next year. They have a team option for Nikola Jokic for the ’18-19 season but conventional wisdom says they should get him locked up long-term over the summer.
Wilson Chandler has a player option for next year that will hit the cap for $12.8 million. He would almost certainly opt-in, thus the urgency to move that money elsewhere. Kenneth Faried has a $13.7 million salary due for ’18-19 and has been relegated to the end of Coach Michael Malone’s bench.
Let’s try to break down what the Nuggets are looking at, by position. We know that Center, Shooting Guard are locked up so we’ll look at Small Forward, Power Forward and Point.