The Denver Nuggets are caught in a tough position with the rarely used Dario Saric picking up his $5.4 million player option for the 2025-26 season, according to Nikola Jokic’s agent, Misko Raznatovic.

The 31-year-old Croatian big man signed with the Nuggets on the taxpayer mid-level exception of 10.6 million over two years last summer. Saric has played in just 16 games last season, despite being listed as healthy for the entire campaign. In that, he’s only come away with a plus-minus in the positive four times.

Saric averaged eight points, 4.4 rebounds and 2.2 assists per game for the Golden State Warriors a year ago, and that’s fallen to 3.5 points, 3.1 rebounds and 1.4 assists per game in his limited action for the Nuggets.

He was thought to be the solution to the Nuggets’ long-known issue of backing up three-time MVP Jokic. But Saric has struggled so much in his 210 minutes this season that he went months without playing, and those stints were broken up by just a handful of minutes.

Now he returns with no clear path to playing.

Backup big DeAndre Jordan is a free agent and may leave or stop playing in the NBA. But youngster DaRon Holmes II should be ready to go, coming off his Achilles tear. Vlatko Cancar is a free agent, which could open up some minutes in the frontcourt, but Peyton Watson is likely to get more action if anything, and Zeke Nnaji is unlikely to be dealt.

The Nuggets will want to trade Saric, but the issue is that his value on the market is underwater. And Denver, partly because of what it took to get Saric into the Mile High City, have very few assets to get off the money.

Since the Nuggets are above the salary cap and luxury tax, they can use this one route per year to sign external players for more than a minimum contract, called the mid-level exception. Denver has used this mechanism to get Jamychal Green, Jeff Green, Bruce Brown and to re-sign Reggie Jackson the past few seasons. On the Jackson deal, Calvin Booth also handed him a player option for a second year, which was for last season, and that was picked up. The Nuggets didn’t want him anymore, in part to clear a spot and salary for Saric, so they dumped Jackson to Charlotte with three second-round picks—severely hamstringing Denver’s ability to make trades.

They traded another haul of second-round picks in recent years to move up for Holmes in the draft and to trade Bones Hyland for Thomas Bryant. The Nuggets have ZERO second-round picks to trade or to draft players as of now for the coming half dozen or so years.

The entire reason the Nuggets did not re-sign Kentavious Caldwell-Pope was to maintain flexibility, with the main upside being able to use the mid-level exception. Basically, if Denver had re-signed KCP last summer, they could have had the same team this past season, just without Saric.

So not only has Saric been bad thus far, but he was expensive to get, and that has kept the Nuggets from improving in other ways. While Jackson didn’t have a good run of it in 2024-25, there were better options than Saric for the Nuggets using the same funds, like Kris Dunn—a key defender for the Los Angeles Clippers, who got time against Denver in the playoffs.

With Saric picking up the money, it could make things harder for the Nuggets in keeping their core around Jokic in Jamal Murray, Aaron Gordon and Michael Porter Jr. together. More likely, this move by Saric will complicate the summer deals of Christian Braun and Peyton Watson, who are each due for extensions. All the while, the Nuggets are going to struggle to add because of the money and roster spot due to Saric, in regard to the second luxury tax apron.

And after all of this, Saric might not even want to be here since he’s still pretty young and likely wants to actually play basketball. He’s drawn some real interest from overseas teams, and he will probably want to get bought out and across the ocean to play. The issue is, the Nuggets don’t have much to offer another NBA team that may use salary cap space to buy the big man out at the cost of getting some draft picks from Denver.

So the Nuggets, who were already caught between a rock and a hard place, had their offseason made more difficult on Sunday. The question still remains: who will be the one to try and punch their way out of the corner? Denver is on the 75th day without a person running their basketball operations.