The Joker’s on us. Why would LeBron James take Tim Hardaway Jr. money to sign with the Nuggets when Tim Hardaway Jr. wouldn’t take Tim Hardaway Jr. money to sign with the Nuggets?
Don’t get me wrong. Dream big or go home, right? King James and Nikola Jokic would destroy at least 60 rims during the regular season and break the Internet roughly 50 times a night. They could serve as the second and third estate to check/balance David Adelman’s executive branch. They’d eat up the first 17 minutes of any given “SportsCenter,” all by themselves. They’d be the best thing for Denver hoops and the worst thing for America’s “caps lock” buttons.
There’s just one problem with the idea of free agent LeBron James, one of the best three or four players ever, calling the Mile High City home at age 41.
The Nuggets probably can’t afford him.
They reportedly hit July sitting at about $12 million above the NBA’s first cap apron and just $900,000 below the second apron. Which means if the King wants to sign a veteran minimum deal in order to play with Jokic, welcome aboard.
Frankly, it’s hard to see Nuggets boss Josh Kroenke pulling that kind of sales job off in this economy. For one thing, Steph Noh’s NBA Salary Model pegs LeBron to be worth at least a $22.7 million contract in 2026-27. If James plays more than 72 games, that estimate creeps into the $30-million-per-year ballpark.
That’s Peyton Watson-level money, allegedly. Which we’ll circle back to in a second.
The Russell Westbrook Experience was fun, or maddening, depending on which fan you ask. But Beastbrook agreed to a two-year contract worth an average of $3.39 million to live the Hard Nuggs Life. Hardaway Jr. took a $2.296 million flyer last summer on a one-year, here-for-the-ring fling.
Miami on Tuesday night basically tripled that number ($6.5 million), and the Nuggets let Tim and his career-high 224 3-pointers from last season walk out the door. Just like that. Meanwhile, Zeke Naji is slated to carry a $7.47-million cap hit next season. No wonder Nuggets faithful so often feel like walking to the nearest brick wall and bashing their foreheads against it for fun.
Nobody deserves those kinds of headaches, time and again. You’d hope Hardaway’s exit is the first sign that the Nuggets’ front office is ready to dig deep to match any offer for Denver’s restricted free agent wing, Peyton Watson, whose January scoring raised his market price and whose April absence raised some eyebrows.
Given Watson’s Los Angeles roots (Long Beach Polytechnic High School, then UCLA), it wasn’t a coincidence that SoCal’s two NBA franchises were the ones who kicked off the first few hours of free agency Tuesday by opening up oodles of cap space to shop with. The Clippers swapped Kawhi Leonard and his $50.3-million cap number to Toronto, while James announced that he was leaving the Lakers, reportedly opening up $51-52 million of cap room for the latter.
Watson can chase the highest bidder, but the Nuggets can match any offer. Is Watson worth $25 million per season if Christian Braun, who landed the extension last summer that P-Swat wanted, is worth $21.55 million to the Kroenkes? Sure. Is Watson worth $30 million, which puts him closer to Aaron Gordon’s ballpark ($31.97 million)? Probably not.
KSE’s first priority should be retaining Watson, who’s young, long, athletic, a rangy defender whose offensive game is finally matching the rest of his skill set. But should that fail, or the competing offers get absurd, then the second goal has to be making sure that Watson doesn’t walk out the door for nothing. The sign-and-trade option shouldn’t be a first resort, but it has to be somewhere within arm’s reach. According to RealGM.com, the Lakers own just three of their first-round picks from 2027-2031. The Clippers, however, reportedly own five over that same span.
The ill-fated Nuggets-Timberwolves series taught us that the franchise still had at least four more things under the hood that needed fixing:
- To get younger and more athletic.
- To get tougher. To find someone else to go after Jaden McDaniels.
- To play better defense.
- To have more adults on the bench who can counsel Adelman in the postseason.
King James ticks three of those four boxes, even as the legend’s 42nd birthday looms in December. Mind you, Gordon largely checks off the same ones, and he’s already on the payroll. For now.
