Pistons will not use stretch provision on DeAndre Jordan

The Pistons will not be using the stretch provision on DeAndre Jordan‘s contract, according to James Edwards III of the Athletic (via Twitter). In a follow-up tweet, Edwards says that Jordan was officially waived Tuesday.

Edwards notes that Jordan gave back $4M of the $19.7M that was left on his contract in his buyout agreement with Detroit. As a result, his base salary will by lowered by $2M each season, resulting in cap hits of approximately $7.9M per year.

The deadline to use the stretch provision on a player’s 2021-22 salary is Sept. 11, per ESPN’s Bobby Marks, so the Pistons had the option of stretching Jordan’s remaining salary across five years instead of two, which would’ve resulted in annual cap hits of about $3.15M, creating more short-term financial flexibility at the cost of long-term freedom. As Edwards observes, Detroit should still have plenty of cap space to utilize in both 2022 and 2023.

A fairly recent example of a team utilizing the stretch provision is the Lakers, who still have Luol Deng‘s $5M on the books this season after waiving and stretching Deng in 2018 in order to create the necessary cap space to sign LeBron James. Coincidentally, Jordan is expected to sign with the Lakers after clearing waivers.

It will be interesting to see how general manager Troy Weaver plans to utilize the Pistons’ cap space in future seasons to build around the team’s intriguing core of 2021 No. 1 overall pick Cade Cunningham, Killian Hayes, Hamidou Diallo, Saddiq Bey, Jerami Grant, and Isaiah Stewart. With Blake Griffin‘s dead money coming off the books at the end of this season, the Pistons could operate under the cap next summer and could create significant cap space in the summer of 2023.