If the Rockets traded Fred VanVleet, Jock Landale, and/or Aaron Holiday on draft night (June 25th), could their acquiring team turn down their options before the June 29th deadline? In other words, if you have a second apron team that is desperate for cheap labor, could you extract a veteran player from them in exchange for one or more of our team option players plus, say, Cam and/or the 10th pick? Or does trading a team option player somehow exercise his option? Thanks in advance!
No. In order to be traded between the end of a team's season and the start of the new league year on July 1st, 2025, players cannot be potential free agents as a result of an ETO or a declined option, exactly to prevent this kind of salary dumping. If the team/player chooses to exercise the option early, or declines to exercise an ETO, then they are free to be included in a trade. This happened when the Rockets picked up Chris Paul from the Clippers; he needed to opt into the final year of his contract in order to allow the trade to happen before July 1st. There is an interesting loophole that would allow for what you are proposing; you can have a contract be mostly or fully non-guaranteed, trade the player, who is still under contract, and then the receiving team can waive them for significant cap savings. Obviously, most agents will fight hard to prevent this kind of language in a contract, because it means their player could both be traded as pure salary filler, but also would not be able to find a new team until well after the initial period of free agency had concluded. So you're only going to agree to such terms if you're getting some over-market compensation in return. The two examples of such in recent memory were KPJ, who had only $1M of his 2024 salary guaranteed until opening night and was traded and waived immediately because of his domestic violence issues. The more interesting recent example is Jeff Green, who originally signed a 2-year, $16M deal in 2023. The second year of the deal was a team option, meaning it had to be exercised by 6/29/24. The interesting thing was that both years of the deal were non-guaranteed until 7/11 each year of the contract; for the first year, that obviously didn't matter since he signed the deal on July 6th, and it was guaranteed 5 days later. However, for the second year, they could have traded him between July 6th and July 10th and he could have been waived by the receiving team for full cap savings. It felt a lot like the old Nene contract under Morey, a significant overpay for a deep bench reserve, with the understanding that it was a walking trade asset.
