Knicks’ OG Anunoby declines player option, becomes unrestricted free agent: Report

OG Anunoby is hitting the free agent market. (Photo by Michael Reaves/Getty Images)

New York Knicks forward OG Anunoby has declined his player option for the 2024-25 NBA season, according to Fred Katz of The Athletic, choosing to enter unrestricted free agency as one of the most intriguing players on the market.

League observers had long expected Anunoby to decline the player option for the final season of the four-year, $72 million contract he signed in December 2020 as a member of the Raptors. Toronto drafted Anunoby with the 23rd pick of the 2017 NBA Draft, with head coaches Dwane Casey and Nick Nurse helping foster his development into one of the NBA’s premier 3-and-D wings — a vital piece on Raptors teams that made the playoffs in each of his first three years as a pro and won the 2019 NBA championship in his sophomore season. (Anunoby missed that entire title run after undergoing an emergency appendectomy right before the start of the postseason.)

Under that deal, Anunoby was set to earn $19.9 million next season. In a financial environment in which the salary cap has risen to $141 million for the ’24-25 campaign, he could wind up nearly doubling that salary in the first year of a new multi-year agreement — one with a total value likely to exceed the four-year, $118 million maximum extension that “Anunoby was limited to signing but would not have accepted with the Raptors,” as Yahoo Sports senior NBA reporter Jake Fischer reported in January.

That lucrative new deal could well come from the Knicks, whose trade for Anunoby helped transform their season.

At the time of the swap, New York sat at 17-14, in seventh place in the Eastern Conference and ranked 16th in the NBA in defensive efficiency, according to Cleaning the Glass. The addition of Anunoby — 6-foot-7, 240 pounds with a 7-foot-2 wingspan and an All-Defensive selection on his résumé — provided a mammoth jolt of adrenaline to Tom Thibodeau’s team, as the Knicks won 12 of Anunoby’s first 14 games and began to look like a bona fide title contender.

Anunoby’s individual production — 14.1 points, 4.4 rebounds and 1.5 assists in…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/knicks-og-anunoby-declines-player-option-becomes-unrestricted-free-agent-report-220421203.html

Author : Yahoo Sports

Publish date : 2024-06-24 22:04:21

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