Harrison Barnes and Jordan McLaughlin each waived the right to veto a trade during the 2026-27 season as part of their new contracts with the San Antonio Spurs, per Hoops Rumors.
The mechanism is a quirk of the collective bargaining agreement. A player who re-signs with his previous team on a one-year deal is automatically granted an implicit no-trade clause — he can block any trade that would move him. A team is allowed to ask him to give it up as a condition of the contract, and San Antonio asked both veterans to do exactly that. Barnes is on a one-year, $8 million deal. McLaughlin is on a minimum contract that pays $3.29 million in 2026-27.
Neither figure is large, and that is the point. Two clean, movable one-year salaries totaling a little over $11 million are the kind of pieces that make midseason math work — salary filler in a larger deal, or a straight swap if the Spurs decide in January that they need a different kind of player. Had either veteran held his veto, San Antonio would have needed his sign-off before including him in anything.
This is the same instinct that showed up in Victor Wembanyama’s extension, where the max at 25 percent rather than the supermax left San Antonio roughly $50 million of long-term room it did not have to spend. A front office that talks about flexibility usually means it in the abstract. The Spurs keep converting it into contract language.
Barnes is 34 and coming off a season in which he served mostly as a floor-spacing veteran alongside the young core; the Spurs also added Tobias Harris on a two-year, $31 million deal that became official July 6, which further crowds the frontcourt minutes behind Wembanyama. McLaughlin gives the team a steady third point guard behind a backcourt that already includes Dylan Harper. Both are useful. Both are now unambiguously tradeable.
From a fantasy standpoint, this is a mild negative for both players’ redraft outlook. Barnes was already a fringe streamer at best in deep leagues, and confirming that San Antonio built in an exit ramp makes his minutes less predictable past the deadline. McLaughlin is off the radar in standard formats. The relevant read for fantasy managers is what it implies about the Spurs’ willingness to reshape the rotation midseason — which is a reason to hold the young pieces, not the veterans.
