The summer of 2018 will be (very) interesting for the NBA, particularly through the lens of a salary cap situation around the league that projects to be quite dicey. With that in mind, players like Mavericks wing Wesley Matthews and Pacers guard Cory Joseph have already chosen to pick up reasonably lucrative player options for the 2018-2019 campaign and, on Thursday, word broke that Sacramento Kings big man Kosta Koufos will be joining them in doing so.
Chris Haynes of ESPN brings word that Koufos will opt in for $8.7 million next season and, in short, that isn’t a surprise. Koufos is a reliable backup big man but in a market in which only a small handful of non-rebuilding teams will have actual salary cap flexibility, the 29-year-old likely would not command anything approaching the dollar figure he will now be receiving in Sacramento.
On an expiring contract, it is theoretically plausible that the Kings could move Koufos, as he would bring potential value to a playoff-level team. Koufos produced a career-best rebounding performance in his tenth season (19.3 percent rebound rate) and Sacramento was better defensively with him on the floor than they were without him. Still, it is hard to see an overly high demand for his services and Koufos choosing to decline his option would have been a far more significant surprise.
The Kings still have a healthy amount of cap space even with Koufos picking up his option. They still await decisions from Iman Shumpert and Garrett Temple on their player options, but the Kings will have, at minimum, $21 million in space this summer to chase free agents and can get closer to $26 million by letting Bruno Caboclo walk as a restricted free agent (his qualifying offer is $3.5 million) and waiving Nigel Hayes’ non-guaranteed deal.
