Understanding the Oni Trade & Roster Options Moving Forward

Oni played a role for last year’s Jazz, but didn’t see much playing time before a January trade to OKC (Rick Bowner via sltrib.com)

Clear back on October 22, Jazz coach Quin Snyder called for Miye Oni to check into a game in Sacramento with 1:36 remaining in the first quarter. Joe Ingles had just been ejected after committing a flagrant foul, and Snyder needed to buy a few minutes with someone who could guard the perimeter and hit open shots, two things Oni had done fairly well as a fringe rotation participant the season prior.

Oni would spend the next 3:48 on the court, and in that time Utah shot 0-for-7 from the field with one turnover. The Kings used a 12-0 surge to build a seven-point cushion, prompting Snyder to turn to rookie Jared Butler instead. That would be the only time all season Oni heard his number called outside of garbage time, and in total he would log just 44 total minutes for the Jazz, shooting 22.2% from the field and 12.5% from outside.

By the time 2022 arrived, it was pretty obvious that Oni — once useful in a 10th man type role — was no longer in the plans, which made the looming January 10 guarantee date on his contract a bit of a spectre for the third-year pro. Keeping him meant footing a significant tax payment for a player who had fallen from Snyder’s good graces and who hadn’t played a meaningful minute since Utah’s second game of the season. Little surprise, then, that the Jazz instead opted to send him to Oklahoma City on Tuesday, along with a future second-round pick.

The move was was fairly understandable from a financial perspective, given their options:

• Keeping Oni all season would have cost the Jazz $1.78 million, and that salary would have cost them $5.54 million in luxury tax payments. That total — $7.32 million — is a lot to pay for a player you’re not using.
• They could have waived him before the January 10 guarantee date. He would have already earned $850K by that point, and that salary would have been taxed at $2.51 million ($3.36 million total).
• But since salary traded midseason doesn’t count on the end-of-year tax bill, moving him into OKC’s cap space saved the Jazz significant money. They still are on the hook for the $789K Oni has earned through Tuesday, but that salary won’t count on their tax bill at all.

That’s what the Jazz are “getting” in this trade: they could have reduced their total Oni-related bill from the $7.32 number to the $3.36 million figure without help, but OKC’s participation allows them to wipe away the $2.51 million in tax as well. 

(They also technically got roster flexibility, but again, they didn’t need OKC’s help to do that. They could have waived Oni on their own to open up a roster spot. OKC doing it for them saves them the tax hit.)

But trades are about giving AND getting, so what was the cost to get that monetary relief? A second round pick. And ultimately that’s fine, really. The $2.5M they saved on Tuesday can easily be used to buy back into the late second round on draft night. It might have been slightly preferable to incentivize OKC’s participation with cash instead of a draft pick, but ultimately that’s what second-round picks are: currency. Picks in the 50s are generally worth $1.5 to 2.5 million in cold, hard cashola anyway.

ESPN’s Bobby Marks reported that the Jazz also got $1 million in cash back from OKC, likely to partially pay for the pick they received.

The net impact of the trade for Utah, in other words: a 2nd round pick for $2.5 million of savings and $1 million of cash.

(Minutia for the nerds: In order to trade that 2028 2nd, the Jazz technically had to alter the protections on the pick the Jazz owe OKC from the Derrick Favors trade. If the protections on that pick keep it from conveying as a first-rounder by 2026, then the Jazz will now owe OKC $890K in cash instead. But it’s highly likely the original OKC pick conveys in 2024, 2025 or 2026, so you can more or less ignore this part of the exchange, as it only happened as a technicality.)

Now What?

The Jazz are currently under the roster minimum, so they’ll have to backfill Oni’s roster spot within the next two weeks. There are a few different ways they can do that.

The most straightforward way is to sign a player to a standard contract, or even convert Trent Forrest’s two-way deal. A rest-of-season contract would be prorated based on the date signed. For example, if they waited the maximum two weeks before signing a 14th player and then inked a rest-of-year deal, it would cost them $441K to add a rookie, $710K in the case of a 1-year vet like Forrest, or $796K for a vet with 2+ years in the league.

Weirdly, though, any of those three would count as a two-year vet for tax purposes. That means $2.3M and change of tax on any January 18 signee, which effectively negates the tax benefit of shipping Oni to OKC. But the point here is that the Jazz are required to use that roster spot anyway, and one would think they’d rather pay $2.3 million in tax for a player they might use as opposed to $2.5 milllion for a player who was bolted down on Snyder’s bench.

The downside of signing somebody now is that they might find a more fruitful use of that roster spot later — either in a trade where they take back an additional player, or at the buyout season. If they want to kick the can for a while before they commit that open spot, they can always engage another maneuver, using spaced out 10-day contracts to minimize the number of days they’re paying salary to a 14th man — and incurring tax on said salary.

If the Jazz waited the maximum amount of time before signing a 10-day guy, then did the same thing each time those contracts ran out, they’d only have to sign four 10-days to get to the end of the year. Assuming they’re signing player(s) at the 2-year vet price, four 10-days could incur a total cost of about $1.3 million in salary and tax, compared to the $4.1 million it would cost to sign a similar vet to a solid rest-of-season contract.

It might be a bad look for a contender to cheap out on just adding a 14th man for actual basketball help, though. That’s especially true with Ingles in COVID-19 protocols and several other Jazz players battling various maladies. So holding out on adding extra help just to shave costs could have a real basketball impact.

That said, it’s entirely likely that they’ll use a couple of 10-day deals just to buy themselves time while they see what materialized ahead of the trade deadline. If a 2-for-1 deal is available or if someone they like gets bought out post-deadline, that could be Utha’s preferred way of adding honest-to-goodness help with that roster spot.

(What isn’t clear at this point is whether the Jazz could sign a cap-neutral replacement contract now that Ingles is in health & safety protocols and count that as their 14th man. One would think that defies the spirit of the law and that the league would not consider a salary exempt from taxes if all it does is bring the roster to the league-mandated minimum… but these rules are being somewhat made up on the fly, and that nuance hasn’t been spelled out very clearly, at least in publicly accessible documents.)

Bottom line: by January 18, the Jazz will need to have added either a more permanent 14th man or at least a short-term plan to meet league requirements while they wait for trade/buyout options to materialize.

So who?

Given the number of roster spots currently occupied by longer-term projects (Elijah Hughes, Jared Butler and Udoka Azubuike rarely play), it would be nice if they found a way to put someone in that roster spot who could contribute in a pinch. With health & safety measures finally hitting the Jazz, there’s a good chance they’re going to need more than just warm bodies at some point in the coming weeks.

It’s highly likely that an established rotation player will find himself hitting the waiver wire sometime after the trade deadline, but the Jazz haven’t exactly been at the front of the line for buyout market signings. They kept a roster spot open last season so they could woo a veteran during buyout season, and instead their big in-season signing was Ersan Ilyasova, who played just 17 games for them.

And again, it would be hard to blame them for rewarding Forrest with a standard NBA deal. The two-way guard has earned that 10th man role right on the edge of the rotation, and in any other year the Jazz would soon be forced to convert him if they wanted to keep using him. The NBA suspended the 50-game limit this year, so there’s no need to convert him, other than just goodwill. Frankly it’s probably smarter to turn over some other stones first, but Forrest earning his way to the regular roster would be a nice story, if not as impactful as the right veteran saying, “Hey, let me come help you win.”

We’ll see how long the Jazz keep their options open… and if they can leverage this newfound flexibility to add someone who could theoretically be a deep bench asset.