Kings trade veteran forward, second-round pick to Spurs in salary dump

The Kings and Spurs have agreed to a trade that will send forward Jalen McDaniels and a second-round pick to San Antonio, reports Shams Charania of ESPN (Twitter links).

It’s a salary-dump deal for Sacramento while San Antonio will take on McDaniels’ $4.74M expiring contract in order to acquire that second-round draft pick. According to Charania, the Spurs intend to waive McDaniels after the trade is official, so his salary will remain on their cap as dead money for the rest of 2024-25.

The 52nd overall pick in the 2019 draft, McDaniels showed some promise during the first four years of his career, which he spent primarily in Charlotte. His height (6-foot-9), wingspan (7-foot) and athleticism made him a versatile piece on defense, and he displayed a little outside shooting ability, making 34.2 percent of his three-point tries with the Hornets. The Sixers traded for him at the 2023 trade deadline.

However, McDaniels’ production and playing time cratered last season in Toronto after he signed a two-year, $9.26M contract with the Raptors. He was sent to Sacramento in another Kings salary dump at the start of the 2024 offseason. In that trade, the Kings sent Sasha Vezenkov and Davion Mitchell to the Raptors, trimming over $8M in salary by moving off two players who were each due salaries over $6M.

The Kings still had financial constraints entering the preseason though, with a total team salary of about $169.7M for 14 players. That gave them just over $1M in breathing room below the luxury tax line, making it impossible to open the season with a full 15-man roster while staying out of tax territory. They also have some players who have unlikely incentives in their contracts, so their team salary could rise higher if those bonuses are earned.

Last month, when we identified five teams who could make cost-cutting moves, we mentioned the Kings, singling out McDaniels as a trade candidate, given his contract situation and his place on the team’s depth chart. At the time, we suggested it would likely take a second-round pick to move off his deal, which turned out to be the case.

Once the trade is official, the Kings will be carrying 13 players on standard contracts (11 fully guaranteed) and will have enough spending room below the tax line to fill out their 15-man regular-season roster with minimum-salary players. Of course, they could still choose to open the season with fewer than 15 players in order to maximize their flexibility.

Sacramento will also create a trade exception worth McDaniels’ $4.74M salary.

For their part, the Spurs can comfortably take on McDaniels’ contract using a portion of their $8M room exception, so no outgoing matching salary is required. The Spurs have one of the lowest team salaries in the NBA and will still have plenty of room below the tax line after eating that contract.

For their troubles, they’ll add another second-round pick to their growing collection of draft assets. The incoming pick from the Kings will be unprotected while the Spurs will send back a heavily protected future second-rounder to make the trade legal, tweets Jeff McDonald of The San Antonio Express-News.

San Antonio has a full 21-man roster, so a player will have to be waived in order to make room for McDaniels; one of the Spurs’ camp invitees on an Exhibit 10 deal figures to be the roster casualty.