For most NBA teams, trading away two rotation players for a handful of future second-round picks might be a bad thing. For the Oklahoma City Thunder, however, it may have saved them roughly $165 million.
Within the space of a few days, the Thunder traded Aaron Wiggins to the Atlanta Hawks and Isaiah Joe to the Detroit Pistons, gaining two future second-round picks for each. On the basketball side of things, a true title contender gave away two useful players for relatively little in future assets. But the move was done for financial reasons – and those reasons were too substantial to ignore.
Oklahoma City entered the offseason facing the problem that always comes with success; paying everybody. After winning 64 games and returning virtually its entire core from its 2024-25 championship-winning team, the Thunder had become one of the most expensive teams in basketball. New deals for Isaiah Hartenstein and Alex Caruso, extensions for Jalen Williams and Chet Holmgren and a roster packed with young talent had pushed them deep into luxury-tax territory and above the dreaded second apron.
Under the NBA’s current Collective Bargaining Agreement, every additional dollar spent above those thresholds becomes increasingly punitive. A relatively small amount of salary can trigger an enormous tax bill. And the aprons are so inhibiting as to be debilitating.
Luxury Tax Means Fewer Luxuries
Wiggins was the first domino to fall. He was owed $9.03 million next season and had three years remaining on his contract, with two guaranteed. A few days later came the other trade. Joe was shipped to Detroit, again with Oklahoma City taking no salary in return, and Joe’s contract carries an $11.32 million cap hit for next season.
Put together, the two trades removed more than $20 million in salary. But it is the luxury tax savings, and the removal of the punitive effects of the aprons, that will pay the real dividends.
The apron system was introduced in the 2023 CBA to make life harder for big spenders. Teams above the first apron lose access to certain roster-building tools – for example, they cannot receive a player in a sign-and-trade transaction and lose access to the larger taxpayer mid-level exception that contenders traditionally used to add veterans. But the second apron is where things become truly restrictive. Teams above the second apron face have no taxpayer mid-level exception at all, cannot aggregate player salaries in trades (i.e. combining multiple contracts to acquire a more expensive player), cannot take back more salary than they send out in a trade, cannot use cash in trades, cannot sign players who were bought out during the season if their previous salary exceeded a certain threshold, and can have their future first-round picks “frozen” and potentially moved to the end of the first round if a team remains above the second apron for multiple years.
The luxury tax savings in 2026-27 cannot be calculated exactly without knowing the exact 2026-27 luxury tax threshold, which will not be known for another week. The latest NBA projection, however, put it at $201 million. Prior to the trades, the Thunder were set to have $220,878,110 in 2026-27 payroll already, a figure that includes the as-yet undetermined team options of Kenrich Williams and Lu Dort (the first of which will surely be declined) but which does not include contracts for first round picks Bennett Stirtz and Aday Mara, and nor does it include a new deal for Isaiah Hartenstein, who enters free agency tomorrow.
Reportedly, Hartenstein will re-sign with the Thunder to a three-year, $75 million contract, while Stirtz and Mara will add another $10.5 million. Assuming a $25 million salary for Hartenstein in 2026-27, then, puts that payroll up to $256.4 million, or approximately $55 million over the threshold. Luxury tax payments are tiered and get increasingly higher the future away a team is from the threshold – for the first $6,065,240 [don’t ask why it’s such a precise amount, it’s a discussion for another time] that they are over it, the Thunder will pay a dollar-for-dollar tax amount, rising to 1.25-1 dollars in tax for the next $6,065,240, then shooting up to 3.5-1 for the next $6,065,240, then 4.75-1 for the next $6,065,240, and growing in $0.50 increments after that.
All told, using best estimates, the Thunder were on track for a $254 million luxury tax bill, on top of their payroll. But without Wiggins and Joe, that drops down to $128 million. And taking out Kenrich Williams will reduce it further to $88 million.
Neither Joe nor Wiggins was dead weight, nor anything close to it. Joe has quietly become one of the league’s elite perimeter shooters, shooting over 42% from three-point range this past season and averaging 11.1 points per game. Wiggins meanwhile averaged 9.4 points while providing dependable minutes across multiple positions. Both were on contracts generally considered team-friendly, hence why the Thunder were able to get draft capital for them, rather than give it up to shift them. But even with that, they were too expensive. As ever, money talks.
Thunder Can Fill Those Spots Again
Unlike the other contenders, the Thunder have an assembly line of young talent arriving every year. They entered this month’s NBA Draft with first-round selections at #12 and #17 as their seemingly limitless cache of draft capital starts to come to fruition, creating an immediate roster crunch. At the same time, Holmgren, Williams and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander remain the centrepieces around which everything else revolves. Paying tax for star players is one thing. Paying tens if not hundreds of millions in penalties to keep the tenth and eleventh men on the roster is another.
The Thunder have spent years accumulating assets and maintaining flexibility, and these moves fit that pattern. The Thunder collected four additional second-round picks, opened roster spots for incoming rookies and – for what it is worth – created sizeable trade exceptions that can be used in future deals. By moving Joe and Wiggins without taking contracts back, Oklahoma City generated trade exceptions worth approximately $11.3 million and $9.2 million respectively. The same apron concerns may well mean that the exceptions expired unused, but the options exist nonetheless.
The irony is that a team coming off one of the best seasons in franchise history, and only 12 months removed from the NBA Championship, has spent this week acting more like a rebuilding club than a contender. Yet that is exactly what the modern NBA encourages. The second apron is designed to make expensive teams uncomfortable, even when those teams are successful. It is a feature, not a bug.
To what extent the Thunder ultimately regret losing Joe’s shooting or Wiggins’s versatility, if at all, remains to be seen. Both players should help their new teams immediately. They are good NBA players. But from the Thunder’s perspective, the calculation was either keep the two useful rotation pieces, or, collect four draft picks, create future flexibility, slash an eye-watering tax bill, prioritize Hartenstein, and actually be able to make moves without the burden of the apron.
Competitive teams should not be dumping good players, especially those on market-value contracts still not into their prime seasons. But the Thunder felt they had to. And for $200 million, who can blame them?
How The Oklahoma City Thunder Saved $165 Million This Week