Sports
Bargain-bin Free Agents NBA Teams Can Still Sign – Bleacher Report
NBA free agency is pretty much behind us, but there are still multiple difference-makers available for teams looking to fill out their rotations.
Given the meager amount of spending power left on the market, any of the remaining free agents might have to sign a veteran-minimum contract or a slightly larger deal via some salary-cap exception.
Even if they hadn’t pictured themselves winding up there before the offseason started, everyone left is essentially in the bargain bin. These players are the best of that bunch, sorted by past production, how they fit in modern basketball, size and plenty of subjectivity.
Any team interested in signing Bismack Biyombo would likely be aiming to make him its third-string center. In that sense, he’s more than capable.
Biyombo will never be more than a rim-runner on offense. Even in that regard, he’s far from the kind of weapon that Clint Capela or Rudy Gobert is.
However, Biyombo can be a dominant defensive presence. He’s 60th all-time in career defensive rebounding percentage and 13th in career block percentage.
Those are the numbers of a bona fide defensive anchor, something that plenty of second or third units are currently missing.
Injuries have wreaked havoc on T.J. Warren’s career as of late.
From 2017-18 through 2019-20, he averaged 19.3 points and shot 37.9 percent from deep across 175 appearances. In the three years since, he’s averaged only 8.2 points across 46 total games.
However, he showed flashes of his old self with the Phoenix Suns down the stretch of the 2022-23 campaign.
Warren’s game was always more about craft, footwork and shotmaking than high-end athleticism. In theory, he should be able to recapture some of that.
As a seventh or eighth man in a team’s rotation, he still might produce some game-changing scoring bursts.
Like Bismack Biyombo, Justise Winslow isn’t the most useful offensive player left on the free-agent market.
Winslow posted an abysmal 46.6 true shooting percentage with the Portland Trail Blazers in 2022-23, which was 11.5 percentage points below the league average. His career 47.7 true shooting percentage is now 625th among the 631 players in league history with at least 728 three-point attempts.
It’s tough for a team to recover from that kind of shooting. However, Winslow has been a plus defender throughout his career.
Thanks to his 6’10” wingspan, Winslow can guard multiple positions. His strength even gives him the ability to guard some bigs.
Despite his dreadful shooting, Winslow could be helpful in the right offensive role. Last season, he averaged 4.7 assists per 75 possessions. His ability to drive, draw the defense and kick out to shooters is solid for a wing.
Terrence Ross had a decent bounce-back campaign between the Orlando Magic and Phoenix Suns in 2022-23. He looks like he could still space the floor for a second unit.
After posting a woeful (and career-worst) 46.7 effective field-goal percentage in 2021-22, Ross was at a barely-below-average 53.2 this past season. He knocked down a respectable 36.8 percent of his three-point attempts, and his volume from deep can still force opposing defenses out to the perimeter.
While Ross’ defense hasn’t been a selling point in years, he still has the size and athleticism to guard backup wings, too.
The 2022-23 season was very much a “good news, bad news” situation for Jaylen Nowell. He averaged a career-high 10.8 points with the Minnesota Timberwolves, but his three-point percentage plummeted from 39.4 in 2021-22 to 28.9 last year.
That inconsistency from deep has been a problem for much of Nowell’s career.
If he can find a way to maintain the level he found in 2021-22, Nowell can be a difference-making floor spacer who can successfully attack the occasional closeout. If not, he doesn’t make enough ancillary contributions to make up for his lack of threes.
But at 24, he’s still young enough to be worth a minimum-salary gamble.
After a promising rookie season in which he averaged 8.8 points per game and shot 37.6 percent from three, Ayo Dosunmu was thrust into a bigger role with the Chicago Bulls in 2022-23. That seemed to stretch him a bit too far.
His scoring didn’t drop much (from 8.8 to 8.6), but his three-point percentage plummeted to 31.2. His assist percentage tumbled, too.
Dosunmu now finds himself still hunting for an offer sheet in late July, after most of free agency has already played out. It’s far too early to give up on the 23-year-old, though.
Dosunmu might not be a starting point guard, but he’s demonstrated an ability to be a secondary playmaker in lineups with ball-dominant wings. His 6’8″ wingspan also makes him a tricky defender for opposing guards to get around.
Shooting has been important throughout the history of basketball, but it’s especially crucial in today’s game, when individual contests are often decided by which team hits more threes. That makes it difficult to look past Hamidou Diallo’s career 27.4 three-point percentage.
Guards and wings who can’t knock down at least 30-35 percent of their triples have a uniquely challenging path to staying in the NBA. But Diallo might have just the right amount (and type) of other skills to navigate that path.
He’s an explosive athlete who hit 59.3 percent of his two-pointers in 2022-23 and can be a real weapon as a cutter and occasional offensive rebounder. His athleticism could be leveraged toward making life more difficult for opposing guards and wings, too.
Particularly in a bench role, all of the above could be useful.
Kelly Oubre Jr. averaged a career-high 20.3 points with the Charlotte Hornets in 2022-23, but injuries limited him to only 48 games. His 49.7 effective field-goal percentage was also his lowest since 2017-18, and it was way below the league average of 54.5.
Inefficiency and questionable shot selection are real concerns, but that kind of scoring upside could help most benches, especially if Oubre was the seventh or eighth man. At this point in free agency, that’s probably the kind of role he’s looking at.
That doesn’t necessarily mean he couldn’t inch his way up a depth chart. Oubre is only 27, and he has the kind of size and positional ambiguity that could make him a nice fit in a positionless scheme.
P.J. Washington almost certainly couldn’t have imagined finding himself in the so-called “bargain bin” when free agency started. In the last season of his rookie contract, he put up a career-high 15.7 points with the Charlotte Hornets.
However, several teams around the league spent their cap space by absorbing contracts through trades. That’s left Washington out in the cold and potentially open to returning to the Hornets on his one-year, $8.5 million qualifying offer, according to Sean Deveney of Heavy.
A sign-and-trade could also be an option, but most rosters seem set ahead of training camp, with the exception of the outstanding Damian Lillard or James Harden trades. Whichever team does get Washington for 2023-24 would have one of the game’s more versatile forwards, though.
There are only 14 players in NBA history who match or exceed all of Washington’s career marks for rebounding percentage, assist percentage, block percentage and steal percentage. It probably comes as no surprise that Washington leads that list in career three-point percentage.
Despite inconsistent roles and playing time, particularly in 2022-23 with the Dallas Mavericks, Christian Wood has been one of the most uniquely productive big men in the NBA over the last three years.
Over that stretch, he’s averaged 18.1 points, 8.9 rebounds, 2.0 assists, 1.8 threes and 1.1 blocks in only 29.3 minutes per game while shooting 38.1 percent from deep. And if you think those are just empty-calorie numbers from someone who doesn’t meaningfully contribute to winning, bear in mind that Wood’s teams’ net ratings have been slightly better when he plays in recent years.
Dallas, which finished last season at 38-44, had a winning record (9-8) in the 17 games Wood started.
Wood turns 28 in September. He’s heading into his prime and could be playing on a veteran-minimum contract in 2023-24. Whichever team lands him will almost certainly be getting a steal.