NBA restricted free agents: How will it play out for Jonathan Kuminga, Josh Giddey, Quentin Grimes and Cam Thomas?

Yahoo

3 days ago

It's late July in the NBA, which means that, with the NBA draft, the most urgent wheeling-and-dealing in free agency and all things Summer League now in the rear-view mirror, the league's attention now turns primarily to restricted free agency.
As a refresher: While unrestricted free agents are free to sign with and join any team they'd like, restricted free agents — who are either former first-round picks coming off their fourth seasons who didn't get an extension of their rookie-scale contracts after Year 3, veteran free agents who have been in the NBA for three or fewer seasons, or players who were just on two-way contracts and were on an NBA roster for at least 15 days the previous season — aren't really that free.
An RFA is allowed to sign an offer sheet with any NBA team, but his previous employer has what's called 'the right of first refusal' — the opportunity to match that offer to retain the player. This has long allowed front offices to slow-play negotiations, forcing players to find a market for their services rather than unnecessarily bidding against themselves.
Sometimes, that's not an issue: The team wants to keep its player around, the player's excited about that, and they quickly hammer out a deal that works for all parties involved. (See: Santi Aldama in Memphis, Davion Mitchell in Miami and Isaiah Jackson in Indiana.) Sometimes, though — particularly in summers where few teams have significant salary cap space and wind up spending it in other ways; summers like this one — the negotiations can become so protracted and trickle to a glacial pace, and a few players can wind up dangling on the market deep into the offseason's dog days.
Let's take a look at a few players stuck in that uncomfortable situation this summer, starting in the stormy, husky, brawling City of the Big Shoulders:
Josh Giddey
The sixth overall pick in the 2021 NBA Draft, Giddey spent his first three pro seasons in Oklahoma City, as part of a developing young core that climbed from the Western basement all the way to the top of the conference in three seasons. But after a troubling playoff performance that saw the Dallas Mavericks essentially play the inconsistent-shooting Giddey off the floor, the 6-foot-8 Australian found himself on the move, dealt to Chicago straight up for ace reserve Alex Caruso — a move that paid immediate dividends for Oklahoma City en route to the 2025 NBA title, and that introduced a few more questions for a Bulls franchise already facing its fair share of them.
Midway through the season, Giddey was struggling to find his footing on a team featuring several other players that operated best with the ball in their hands. After the trade that sent Zach LaVine to Sacramento, though, Giddey slotted into a more central role … and started putting up All-Star-caliber numbers.
Giddey averaged 21.2 points, 10.7 rebounds, 9.3 assists and 1.5 steals in 34.2 minutes per game on .620 true shooting after the All-Star break — obscene, Jokić-type stats — to help fuel a late-season run that saw the Bulls win 15 of their final 21 games. That surge got Chicago into ninth place in the East, and back to the play-in tournament; while they promptly bowed out to the Heat, Giddey did put up a 25-point, 10-rebound double-double in defeat.
That led to one of the more interesting questions of the offseason: How much stock would Chicago, and the league as a whole, put in Giddey's play during that closing kick? Would it spur the Bulls or another interested suitor to move quickly, hoping to lock him up at a high price to be their top offensive creator? Or would a combination of factors — the shooting-and-defensive concerns that led to his exit from Oklahoma City, the famously unreliable nature of stats piled up down the stretch of seasons where plenty of opponents are playing for ping-pong balls, the paucity of cash available on the market, etc. — lead teams to view Giddey more as a complementary piece than a cornerstone, and leave them unwilling to tender the kind of deal that his reps were seeking?
Seeing as we're now on the backside of Bastille Day and Giddey doesn't have a deal, I think it's safe to say we've got our answer.
While multiple reports expect the negotiation to end with Giddey back in Chicago, player and team clearly haven't arrived at a price point that works for both sides. According to Marc Stein and Jake Fischer, 'Giddey's representation has not wavered in its pursuit of a $30 million annual salary, sources say, while the Bulls' offers have been much closer to $20 million.'
On one hand, with most of this summer's business already concluded and nobody having real cap space besides the Nets (who have their own RFA issue to resolve, which we'll get to shortly), it seems exceedingly unlikely that Giddey's going to find $30 million anywhere on the market, barring some team suddenly deciding to dramatically restructure its entire balance sheet due to a newfound belief that it just has to have him. On the other, we just saw the Bucks and Suns pull precisely that sort of facelift, buying out nine-figure salaries that few thought could realistically be stretched … right up until they actually were.
Is there anybody out there willing to do that for Josh Giddey? At this stage, it doesn't seem like it … which is why the Bulls feel like they can afford to continue putting on the squeeze.
Jonathan Kuminga
Taken one pick after Giddey in 2021 out of the now-shuttered G League Ignite program, Kuminga was supposed to help build a bridge to continuing dynastic dominance in the Bay — a part of the much-discussed 'two timelines' approach that would allow the Warriors to transition into a new era of consistent contention. That hasn't really worked out, for a number of reasons: the James Wiseman pick not panning out, Green's infamous sucker-punching of Jordan Poole, Poole's subsequent exit from the franchise … and the consistent discomfort over Kuminga's role, performance and spot in the Warriors' hierarchy.
Kuminga has proven capable of putting up numbers, averaging 15.8 points on 49.9% shooting and 4.7 rebounds in 25.6 minutes per game over the last two seasons. That production has increased when he's gotten the opportunity to start: 17.1 points on 51.4% shooting to go with 5.1 rebounds, 2.7 assists and 1.4 combined steals-and-blocks in 28.8 minutes per game over 56 starts.
Only a handful of players Kuminga's age have produced like that over the past couple of seasons: Alperen Şengün, Jalen Williams, Evan Mobley, Chet Holmgren and Jalen Johnson. All five of those guys have already secured monster bags; Kuminga, though, continues to wait.
There are, of course, notable differences! Mobley, Holmgren and Williams had paired their offensive production with high-level defensive work for playoff teams. Şengün had shown enough as a Jokić-esque playmaking hub and improving back-line defender to make the Rockets think he'd soon reach All-Star status. (They were right.) Johnson has battled injuries on an underwhelming Hawks team, but has also flashed similarly elite two-way ability and shown signs of advanced playmaking feel, averaging more than four assists per game over the last two seasons.
Kuminga, however, owns a 1.3-to-1 career assist-to-turnover ratio and hasn't developed into the kind of on-ball stopper that you'd hope for from a 6-foot-8, 210-pound über-athlete with a 6-foot-11 wingspan. That's a problem in Golden State, where the ecosystem that Steve Kerr has built around Stephen Curry requires everybody else to move the ball and their bodies, knock down 3s off the catch, defend like demons, and generally fit into a defined role. The need to get in where you fit in became even more acute once the Warriors traded for Jimmy Butler: a high-efficiency, low-turnover defensive ace who plays Kuminga's position.
That's the thing, though: If you were in your early 20s, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and bulldoze your way to 20 points a game … would you want to fit in? Or would you want to stand out?
The final month of the Warriors' 2024-25 season laid bare the state of affairs. With a chance to avoid the play-in tournament on the line in Golden State's regular-season finale, Kerr played Butler 48 minutes in an overtime loss to the Clippers … and gave Kuminga a DNP-CD. With the Warriors needing a win in the play-in to secure the seventh seed, Kerr played Butler 40 minutes … and gave Kuminga a DNP-CD.
In the first round of the playoffs against the Rockets, Kuminga wound up with more DNP-CDs (four) than games played (three) and logged just seven minutes in the deciding Game 7. In the first game of Round 2, Kuminga played just 13 minutes as Golden State won to take a 1-0 lead on the favored Timberwolves. After Curry injured his hamstring in Game 1, though, Kerr found himself in need of somebody, anybody, who could make something happen with the ball in his hands; over the next four games, Kuminga averaged 31 minutes a night, averaging 24.3 points per game on 55/39/72 shooting splits. (He also had five assists against eight turnovers over those four games; the Warriors lost his minutes by 28 points, lost all four games, and lost the series.)
When Kerr went away from Kuminga entirely during the biggest moments of the season, it seemed like the end of the 22-year-old's time in Golden State. When Kuminga exploded against one of the NBA's best defenses, it seemed like an audition — a suggestion that he still has the upside of a star-level wing, if a team would just toss him the keys.
'That's what's been on my mind,' Kuminga told Anthony Slater of The Athletic last month. 'Things take time, but I feel like I'm at the point where that has to be my priority, to just be one of the guys a team relies on. Aiming to be an All-Star. Multiple times. Aiming to be great. … Wherever I'm going to be at, it don't matter if it's the Warriors or if it's anywhere else, it's something I want. I want to see what I could do. I know I got it. So I want to really see. I've never got that chance.'
As we creep toward August, though, it remains unclear if anyone's going to pay up to give Kuminga that chance.
Early in free agency, the Warriors were reportedly seeking a first-round pick and young talent to part ways with Kuminga in a sign-and-trade; no such deal materialized. Fischer recently reported that the Kings, Bulls and Suns have all expressed at least some level of interest in Kuminga. But with Golden State continuing to seek 'some level of first-round draft compensation' in any sign-and-trade, while also being reluctant to agree to an average annual value of $25 million a year or more on a long-term contract, the wheels are moving in slow motion — if they're moving at all.
If Kuminga's frustrated enough by the lack of motion that he decides he just wants to make as clean a break as he can, he can choose to sign his $7.9 million qualifying offer for next season, allowing him to enter unrestricted free agency in the summer of 2026. That can be a perilous path, though, inviting the possibility that injury or poor performance could leave a player struggling to find even the kind of deal that he'd previously scoffed at:
With Curry, Butler and Draymond Green all on the wrong side of 35, Warriors brass knows Kuminga's contract could represent the Warriors' best asset/trade chip to play in pursuit of meaningful talent upgrades. But base-year compensation rules dictating that a player's new salary in a sign-and-trade only counts for half as much to the trading team as it does for the acquiring team — meaning that if they sign Kuminga to a $25 million deal, it would only count as $12.5 million in outgoing salary for the Warriors — both complicate the math and potentially mean the Warriors wouldn't get as much bang for their buck in return on a Kuminga sign-and-trade right now.
The likeliest outcome, then, might be Kuminga and the Warriors agreeing to a shorter-term deal that can be dealt on Jan. 15. 'More waiting' probably isn't the resolution that Kuminga was hoping for. But if it comes attached to the opportunity to run free in a few months' time, and to potentially hit the unrestricted market sooner rather than later, then maybe it'll be worth the wait.
Quentin Grimes
There wasn't much to celebrate in a 2024-25 season that saw the 76ers lose more player games to injury than any other team in the NBA, with significant absences for Joel Embiid, Paul George, Tyrese Maxey and prized rookie Jared McCain effectively scuttling Philadelphia's chances of even fielding a competitive roster for the bulk of the calendar. The brightest spot, though, was Grimes — a former first-round pick of the Knicks who'd bounced around to Detroit and Dallas before landing in Philly as sort of an after-shock of the Luka Dončić deal.
That trade made Max Christie a Maverick, leaving Dallas with what looked like a redundancy in the 3-and-D shooting guard department. And since Christie was under contract for multiple seasons while Grimes was ticketed for RFA, Nico Harrson decided to flip Grimes to the Sixers (along with the 2025 second-round pick that became Auburn big man Johni Broome) in exchange for Caleb Martin — an established veteran combo forward who, again, was under contract for multiple seasons.
Martin battled injuries and didn't make much of an impact in the balance of his first season in Dallas. Grimes, on the other hand, touched down and immediately went bananas.
Only five NBA players made 75 3-pointers, dished 100 assists, and snagged 35 steals after the trade deadline last season: Dončić, James Harden, Stephen Curry, Tyrese Haliburton … and Grimes, who stepped into a yawning void on the injury-ravaged Sixers and did his level best to fill it. The swingman averaged 21.9 points, 5.2 rebounds, 4.5 assists and 1.5 steals in 33.7 minutes per game, shooting 46.9% from the field, 37.3% from 3-point range on 7.9 attempts per game, and 75.2% from the foul line.
Grimes posted by far the highest usage, assist and free-throw attempt rates of his career, showing more craft operating in the pick-and-roll and more decisiveness in attacking the rim than he had while working primarily as a complementary floor-spacer in his first three pro stops, and generally looked like a guy capable of a hell of a lot more than a lot of people thought on the offensive end. Your mileage may vary when it comes to how well all that might translate in a scaled-back role on a healthier roster — the kind of roster, y'know, we might never see in Philly — but what Grimes displayed was the kind of stuff that plenty of teams are dying to find on the wing.
Unfortunately for Grimes, though, those teams either didn't have cap space this summer or found alternate uses for it in the early days of free agency. Sixers president of basketball operations Daryl Morey said during a media availability at Las Vegas Summer League that he 'hope[s] to work things out' and bring Grimes back to the fold. The Sixers telegraphed that intention by allowing forward Guerschon Yabusele to leave and sign with the Knicks, who gave the French big man a deal worth $11.3 million over the next two years — an amount the Sixers couldn't have matched without using their midlevel exception, which would've hard-capped Philly at the second apron, encumbering their ability to match an offer sheet if Grimes should sign one.
"Yeah, that sucked. … We offered [Yabusele] the most we could that wouldn't limit us and our ability to retain Quentin," Morey said, according to Adam Aaronson of PhillyVoice. "... We want to retain Quentin. We hope to work that out with his representation, and our focus was on making sure that happens.'
It probably will. Fischer recently reported that Grimes and the Sixers are expected to reach an agreement covering at least the next three seasons. How lucrative a deal it will be, though, remains unclear. A player who can do the things that Grimes showcased down the stretch last season surely imagines himself making well over $20 million a year and playing a starring role; a team like the Sixers, with so much money devoted to the Big Three of Embiid, George and Maxey, surely feels pressure to wring every ounce of value possible out of the other contracts on its books.
Whatever the compromise figure winds up being, though, I wouldn't consider Grimes a serious threat to sign his qualifying offer to hit unrestricted free agency next summer. As the 25th pick in the 2021 draft, he's only made about $11 million in NBA salary to date; even a midlevel exception deal would represent by far the biggest payday of his career, and dudes who've yet to cash in don't tend to pass those up.
Cam Thomas
Thomas, the No. 27 pick in 2021's draft, has made it clear multiple times that he'd love to re-sign with the Nets. But while Brooklyn looms as the only team in the NBA with any real spending power left under the salary cap, and has conducted plenty of business this offseason — trading Cam Johnson to Denver for Michael Porter Jr. and an unprotected 2032 first-round pick; renting out cap space in the multi-team deals that landed Kristaps Porziņġis in Atlanta and Kevin Durant in Houston to come away with Terance Mann, rookie Drake Powell and some future second-round picks; making a record five picks in the first round of the 2025 NBA draft — Thomas is still waiting to conduct his business.
As recently as four days ago, Fischer reported that the Nets 'have yet to even significantly engage' Thomas in talks on a new deal. You'd forgive Thomas for being frustrated by that. After all, the dude led Brooklyn in scoring in each of the last two seasons, averaging 22.9 points per game on .560 true shooting in that span. Only 29 other players have scored that much that efficiently over the past two seasons; all 29 of them have made an All-Star team in their careers.
And those numbers are on the upswing: Thomas averaged 24 a night on .575 true shooting last season, one of just 19 NBA players to do that. The rest of that list looks like an All-NBA ballot, with some honorable mentions for missing games. When it comes to putting the ball in the basket, the LSU product belongs in rarefied air.
Thomas knows it, too … which hasn't exactly greased the skids on getting a deal done, according to Brian Lewis of the New York Post:
Thomas has openly said he views himself as one of the best shooting guards in the league.
A source familiar with Thomas' thinking said he does not consider himself inferior to Immanuel Quickley ($32.5 million this upcoming season), Tyler Herro ($31 million) or RJ Barrett ($27.7 million).
'No way,' the source said. 'So he could want $30 million, too.' [...]
The problem is no other teams have legitimate cap space, meaning the young guard has no market.
And the Nets are unlikely to bid against themselves.
Especially if they don't think anyone else is about to pull off one of those dramatic balance-sheet-reorienting moves to bring in a player viewed by many as an excellent scorer who — despite increasing his assist rate last season and grading out as a solid net-positive player according to Taylor Snarr's estimated plus-minus metric at Dunks and Threes — doesn't bring similar value in other areas of the game. (It's worth noting that the positive EPM owes almost exclusively to the offensive end of the floor, where Thomas finished in the 97th percentile among all players, compared to the 3rd percentile on defense.)
That's the view that Zach Lowe of The Ringer relayed during a recent episode of his podcast, conveying his impression from conversation with folks around the NBA that 'the consensus on Cam Thomas, if there is one — and he's got some fans, and he's got some mega-detractors — but the consensus is kind of, like, 'empty calories ball hog.''
That was one pull-quote from a 10-minute conversation on the nature of Thomas' game, the growth he's displayed and the opportunities he has for more — a conversation that, for what it's worth, I thought seemed pretty fair on balance.
It, as you might expect, did not go over so hot with Cam Thomas:
There's a lot of truth in Thomas' rebuttals. The Nets did start the season as an exceedingly pleasant surprise, sitting just under .500 and tied for 10th in offensive efficiency when Thomas suffered a hamstring injury that kept him sidelined for the better part of three months, effectively derailing his season. When Thomas returned after the All-Star break, the Nets had traded Dennis Schröder and Dorian Finney-Smith, waived Ben Simmons, and were already plunging (respectfully!) toward the bottom of the standings in hopes of a lottery come-up. Not exactly an environment conducive to playing The Beautiful Game!
Opponents clearly understand that Thomas is a dangerous scoring threat with the ball in his hands …
… though it's worth wondering if the frequency with which they throw doubles at him is a function of how little offensive talent he's surrounded by, a lack of faith that he's willing or able to make the right pass out of that kind of pressure, or a belief that he's liable to just try to raise up and make a low-percentage, high-radness shot over two defenders. (The answer might be, 'All of the above.')
Wherever you stand on Thomas' game and prospects for advancing it — I thought Lucas Kaplan's read on it at NetsDaily was pretty fair — it seems clear the Nets' position is, 'We don't think anybody else is going to come up with a ton of money, so we're going to see what kind of deal we can get here.' The bet here: If that wait-and-see approach winds up with Brooklyn landing an efficient mid-20s-per-game scorer for midlevel money, then all those who'd previously turned up their noses at Thomas' game will suddenly start calling him one of the steals of the summer. Funny how that works out.