The Denver Nuggets sorted their bench into keep and release piles this week. Denver tendered qualifying offers to forwards Peyton Watson and Spencer Jones, making both restricted free agents, and declined the fourth-year team option on guard Jalen Pickett, per reporting from Hoops Rumors and Denver Sports. Watson’s qualifying offer is worth $6.5 million and Jones’ is worth $2.65 million, and neither player is expected to simply accept.
Watson is the decision that will define Denver’s summer. The qualifying offer secures matching rights, but the market is where this gets expensive: projections reported by Denver Sports for Watson’s next contract range from $15 million to as much as $30 million a season. Hoops Rumors reports Denver has been widely expected to shed salary to make re-signing him feasible, which tells you how the front office ranks him — a 6-foot-8 wing who blocks shots at a rare rate for his position is precisely the kind of player a team built around one transcendent offensive hub cannot afford to develop for three years and then hand to a competitor.
Jones is the quieter but telling move. Per Denver Sports, the 25-year-old could command something like $10 million over three years as a defensive role player, real money for a team already looking to trim payroll. Tendering his offer anyway suggests Denver views last season’s minutes as a floor rather than a fluke.
The Pickett decision is where the honesty about depth comes in. Declining his $2.41 million option saves almost nothing and leaves the point guard depth chart nearly bare behind the starters — a thin margin for a roster whose offense runs through one player’s vision and needs credible ball-handlers to survive non-star minutes. Denver Sports reads the move as a sign of the front office’s confidence that Jones can be brought back to bolster the guard rotation. Perhaps. But confidence is not a contract, and the second unit’s shot creation was already the roster’s soft spot before this week.
What comes next: front-office co-heads Jon Wallace and Ben Tenzer now negotiate Watson’s future while shopping for the salary relief that makes it possible. The order of those two operations will tell us plenty about how much leverage Denver thinks it has.
