January 7th and 10th are important dates on the NBA calendar. On the latter date, all partially or non-guaranteed contracts become fully guaranteed. The former date\u2014at 4 p.m. Central time, specifically\u2014is when a team would need to waive a player on such contracts to avoid his salary becoming fully guaranteed, because the waiver process takes two days, thus clearing waivers and hitting free agency by the 10th. The Bucks have one player whose salary becomes fully guaranteed in three days: little-used veteran wing Amir Coffey, who\u2019s on a one-year, veteran\u2019s minimum contract. He was not waived by the deadline today, so he will continue as a Buck for now, and the 15-man roster remains full.<\/p>\n
This doesn\u2019t preclude Milwaukee from waiving him later, though. Should they decide to open up a roster spot by waiving Coffey, they\u2019ll still owe him the $2.3m salary being guaranteed this week, but that\u2019s not a significant financial problem. With a cap figure of $176.4m, they are $11.5m clear of the luxury tax threshold, and $16.8m beneath the first apron, where penalties begin. If they waive Coffey, those numbers remain the same, but they\u2019d have plenty of room to fill the spot or add salary in trades without paying the tax, which is an apparent goal for the franchise after doing so the last several seasons, in order to reset their repeater penalty clock.<\/p>\n
Coffey, 28, is averaging a meager 1.5 PPG this year on .423\/.250\/1.000 shooting. The Minnesota alum has gotten into 22 games, though nearly all would be classified as garbage time appearances. He was somewhat in the rotation through Milwaukee\u2019s first dozen games, but since November 14th, he\u2019s logged 14 DNP-CDs and entered eight times when games were out of reach (unfortunately, that means he\u2019s been a part of six losses). His most recent minutes came on December 26th in Memphis.<\/p>\n
On paper, he has the exact kind of size the Bucks are sorely lacking on the wing at 6\u20197\u201d, probably able to play the four in smaller lineups too. But Doc Rivers continues to go small, splitting minutes at the three between the nominal starter AJ Green, ahead of Kyle Kuzma, plus reserve guards Gary Trent Jr., and Gary Harris. Kuzma has played his fair share there too, of course, but is a natural four, and the others are much better suited to the two.<\/p>\n
To be frank, Coffey hasn\u2019t looked particularly good when he\u2019s played this season. But other than for injury assurance, I\u2019m not sure why they\u2019re keeping him around since they clearly prefer not to use him. Even Giannis\u2019 injury didn\u2019t get him out of mothballs. He\u2019s stuck behind the trio of guards, Kuz, and probably even Andre Jackson Jr., so it may take at least two of those guys being out for him to see meaningful minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"January 7th and 10th are important dates on the NBA calendar. On the latter date, all partially or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":523524,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3775],"tags":[7,103,40296,102,121,3871,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-523523","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-milwaukee-bucks","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-bucks","10":"tag-bucks-free-agency","11":"tag-milwaukee","12":"tag-milwaukee-bucks","13":"tag-milwaukeebucks","14":"tag-nba"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/115856273873257909","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/523524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=523523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=523523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}