The Toronto Raptors will waive Alfonzo McKinnie, according to a report from Shams Charania of Yahoo.
The Raptors have until Wednesday at 5 p.m. ET to officially waive McKinnie to make sure his contract cleared waivers ahead of a July 20 guarantee date. Beyond that date, McKinnie would have been locked in for a guaranteed minimum contract for the 2018-19 season.
McKinnie used his opportunity at Las Vegas Summer League last year to earn a two-year deal with a $100,000 guarantee and impressed enough throughout the summer and training camp to beat out K.J. McDaniels for the Raptors’ 14th and final (at the time) roster spot. He never got the chance to prove that he could play at the NBA level, though, appearing in 14 games for a total for just 53 total minutes. He’ll leave the Raptors with the fourth-fewest minutes ever for a Raptor who lasted at least a full season on the roster, ahead of Nathan Jawai, Aleksandar Radojevic, and Sean Marks.
That doesn’t mean McKinnie didn’t have a good year. As covered in his season player review, his already stout defense took another step forward in heavy time with Raptors 905, to the point that he was a key piece at that end of the floor for the league’s best defense and eventual runner up. With the size and rebounding ability to play power forward and the quickness to guard most threes, McKinnie profiled as an interesting 3-and-D piece with some real transition juice and a fun tool on the offensive glass. The lack of “3” in that equation likely doomed him here. His 3-point percentage improved from 30.8 percent to 32.6 percent (including the postseason) in the G League this year, hardly enough of a jump. There are some encouraging signs within that number – McKinnie bumped from the 25th percentile to 42nd percentile as a spot-up shooter and hit 33.8 percent of his looks from the corners – and the lack of consistency there put him on the bubble heading into Summer League.
There, McKinnie turned in a disappointing few games, shooting 5-of-26 on threes. He shot just 26.2 percent for Summer League as a whole, averaging 7.5 points and 4.5 rebounds. He has a tremendous story and was really well-liked in the organization for his hard work and culture fit, but at a certain point you have to hit shots.
Now 25, McKinnie becomes a sacrifice in the name of flexibility, as these end-of-roster spots often dictate with their churn. Rather than lock into McKinnie, the Raptors can now explore a number of other names for that spot, and a handful of players in Vegas looked more intriguing over the small sample, including some on the wing. McKinnie will almost surely be able to catch on somewhere for a training camp invite or an Exhibit 10 contract, and the Windy City Bulls would be glad to have him back with their G League program if he winds up re-entering the player pool (the Bulls own his G League rights, not the 905). There’s still a lot to like in his profile, and he can really defend, he just didn’t shoot well enough to warrant extending the experiment in Toronto longer on a guarantee.
The move trims the Raptors’ roster to 12 and leaves them with three open roster spots and their two two-way contracts available to them. (There is no cap/tax benefit here, by the way, as all minimum contracts are treated the same for luxury tax purposes, and McKinnie was therefore no cheaper or more expensive than another option; I’d expect them to only roster 14 plus the two two-ways again this year for tax reasons.) The roster can even expand as large as 20 over summer and preseason, so you could see a number of players signed to compete for those final spots in training camp, similar to last year when several players competed for the final spot(s) that eventually went to McKinnie.
