Issue #13 - Cap Management Pt. 2
electric boogaloo
Alright folks - I’m back after another year long hiatus with another issue of Ankit’s Cool OKC Thunder Newsletter hot off the press. The Thunder have unfortunately lost the Western Conference Finals to the San Antonio Spurs after a 7 game war. Though it’s not how I hoped the season would end, we move to one of the most interesting parts of the NBA season: the offseason! And with that comes speculation on how the Thunder will navigate their cap sheet. 💸
Throughout this playoff run, the Thunder have showcased remarkable depth up and down their roster. From Jared McCain — a second-year player and mid-season acquisition thrust into a starting role — to Kenrich Williams, their 13th man, coming up big in a pivotal Game 5, Oklahoma City has found contributors from the most unlikely places.
Most importantly, the Thunder’s beloved Isaiah Hartenstein has gone from unplayable in game 1 of the WCF to a massive piece in keeping the Thunder afloat on both sides of the ball for the rest of the series. With a team as talented and deep as the Thunder are - the discourse in NBA circles on the internet is once again: “There’s just no way the Thunder can keep this group together!”
In this article - I plan to explain how we will keep this group together - and it frankly, won’t require many (if any) difficult decisions this summer.
If you haven’t read them yet, I’d suggest reading these two articles for context:
Issue #9 - The New CBA for Dummies - if you are unfamiliar with some of the rules in the CBA.
Issue #12 - How Will OKC Manage its Cap? - if you want to see my previous stab at how the Thunder would address this issue.
Constraints
I believe the Thunder will continue to abide by the same constraints that I listed in Issue #12. Here’s a quick recap:
The Thunder will stay under the Second Apron as much as possible. And certainly will never go over the Second Apron in back-to-back years, to preserve draft flexibility. For all intents and purposes, I believe just avoiding the Second Apron in any singular year is the goal, and achievable.
The Thunder will pay the Luxury Tax, but avoid the Repeater Tax under this CBA. This is guaranteed since they would have to pay the luxury tax in the 26-27, 27-28 and 28-29 seasons to enter the Repeater Tax.
For the sake of this article, I’ll assume placeholder contracts at $3,000,000 to make the math easy and assume we are rostering 15 players at all times.
And a final new constraint that was implied - all decisions are being made knowing that the NBAPU and the NBA can (and almost assuredly will) opt out of the Current CBA following the 2028-2029 season.
Draft Picks
The core of the Thunder’s strategy to keep this current run going is to continue supplanting the depth of this roster via draft picks. This may mean actually using draft picks to select players, but also using some of those draft picks to acquire players (e.g. Jared McCain) if the price is right.
Here is the status of the current war chest:
The #12, #17 and #37 picks in the 2026 NBA draft
OKC owns all of its own draft picks from 2027-2033+
2027 LAC pick swap
2027 DEN - top 5 protected (rolls over to 2028+2029 if it doesn’t convey)
2027 SAS - top 16 protected (converts to 2 second round picks if it doesn’t convey)
2028 DAL pick swap
2029 DEN - top 5 protected (rolls over to 2029+2030 if it doesn’t convey)
and a ton of 2nd round picks
Current State of OKC Contracts
Here are some key decisions coming up:
Cason Wallace enters the last year of his rookie deal, and will be due an extension.
Lu Dort has a team option for 26-27
Isaiah Hartenstein has a team option for 26-27
Kenrich Williams has a team option for 26-27
Isaiah Hartenstein
As I mentioned before, Isaiah Hartenstein is the player that this Summer is gonna be focused around. When I originally wrote my Cap Management article last year, it seemed like a pretty easy financial move to decline Hartenstein’s option and keep the other 14 guys on the team.
In this season, Hartenstein averaged 9 points, 9 rebounds and 3 assists. These stats seem pretty pedestrian for a guy who is slated to make $20mil+ this coming summer. However, his impact on this team isn’t strictly quantified in box score stats. His ability to take up space, set screens and be an offensive hub for the Thunder has been absolutely crucial. His size and shockingly nimble feet and willingness to play with physicality have made him a reliable defender on Victor Wembanyama and Nikola Jokic who seemingly will be the Thunder’s biggest opposition in the years to come.
In the 2 years that Hartenstein has been part of the team, the Thunder have gone 132-32 (80% win rate), won the 2025 Championship and were in the 2026 Western Conference Finals. I believe it is not a coincidence, and that is is of the utmost importance to keep Isaiah Hartenstein on this team for as long as possible. The rest of this article will be focused around the decisions that will be made in order to make that happen.
The Path Forward
The Spreadsheet
If you’re interested in messing around with this spreadsheet yourself — here’s a link to the spreadsheet shown above. Feel free to make a copy and go crazy. I’d love to see what predictions you guys come up with.
There’s a key for what the colors mean in the top right corner. All penalties are calculated formulaically based on the salaries for each player. Penalties are the negative numbers in the orange cells in the bottom section. Please note that my predictions are denoted in the green cells.
If there’s anything wrong or weird about it — feel free to let me know and I can try to fix it. I’m not a spreadsheet wizard by any means, but I try my best. 🙂
Predicted Decisions
Cason Wallace signs a 5 year ~$135m contract extension, starting at $23m in 27-28 increasing at 8% a year till Summer 2032.
Isaiah Hartenstein has his $28mil option declined in 26-27, and returns on a ~$75mil, 3y contract which would keep him in OKC till Summer 2029.
How do we make it all work?
The Cason Wallace extension doesn’t affect the Thunder’s cap sheet in 26-27, so I’m not gonna focus much on it. Cason is an incredible player who fills a crucial role for the Thunder as a point attack defender that can dribble, pass and shoot. He’s not going anywhere, and his contract extension is well deserved.
The more interesting question is: how do we keep Hartenstein around? My answer to that is decline Hartenstein’s option, bring him back on a slightly lower annual salary, and let a couple players go as cap casualties. Why would iHart take less money? A combination of a couple reasons:
Hartenstein has made it clear in a number of interviews that he values winning basketball and the Thunder win. A lot.
It’s a reasonable tradeoff that many players make to take a slightly discount in annual salary for more guaranteed years.
A $23,000,000 annual salary is a $5,000,000 discount that would still make him the 14th highest paid center in the NBA.
Moves with a 99% chance of happening
Lu Dort has his team option declined, and walks in free agency. Dort, changed agents and has signed with Klutch Sports to represent him. This is a strong signal to me that he is ready to move on from the Thunder to secure one last contract elsewhere. The growth of Cason Wallace and Ajay Mitchell has made Dort’s role on this team somewhat redundant and he becomes an unfortunate cap casualty. This would save us $18,222,222 in the 26-27 season.
Kenrich has his team option for $7,163,000 declined. He potentially (dare I say likely?) returns on a vet min, depending on what other moves the Thunder make.
I also believe the Thunder will use their #12 and #17 draft picks in the draft in an effort to replenish their roster depth.
And then one of these potential moves:
Option #1 - Trade Wiggins
Trade the Savior of Basketball: Aaron Wiggins and replace his $8.8mil contract with a vet min or guaranteed 2nd round pick contract (e.g. Brooks Barnhizer or a 2026 draftee). Replacing this contract with a vet min or rookie scale contract would save the Thunder at least $5,000,000.
Option #2 - Keep Wiggins, go with 14 players
I think it’s important to note that one of my constraints was to roster 15 players at all times. However, I think there may be a world where the Thunder may break this 15 man constraint and go through the season with only 14 players in order to keep Aaron Wiggins for 1 more season.
This is feasible given the Thunder’s willingness to lean into two-way players to bolster their regular season rotation and be a pseudo-15th man. And despite the tremendous depth and willingness to use it in the playoffs - the Thunder have yet to feel pressured to use their 15th man (Nikola Topić) in this playoffs (aside from garbage time), on top of the fact that they’ve had a player missing the entire playoffs two seasons in a row (Sorber in 25-26 and Topić in 24-25).
So in concrete terms, this option would mean trading Nikola Topić somewhere and not replacing his contract with another contract. Topić has had the absolute worst luck with his health, and has had a tough time finding his footing on this team to no fault of his own. I think Presti and the front office would find it mutually beneficial to get some cap relief while also letting Topić get a real shot at finding development minutes on a team that doesn’t have championship expectations.
Trades
Based on cap reasons, it seems incredibly unlikely to make a trade this summer because the Thunder are deeply committed to the team with Shai, JDub and Chet as their core trio, surrounded by elite role players in Alex Caruso, Isaiah Hartenstein and Cason Wallace. The cheap depth rounding out the rest of the roster seems incredibly hard to get better bang for buck on while simultaneously making it hard to match salaries for a player with a significant contract.
If you want to see more details as to why I don’t believe we will make a substantial trade for a player, checkout my 2026 Offseason Trade article!
What do we do?
Personally, I think it’s more likely that we go with Option #1 and trade Wiggins. I think Wiggins is still a positive asset, especially with his cheap contract, and I think Presti will want to maintain 15 people on this roster. However, I would prefer going with Option #2 because despite the down year, I still am a Wiggins believer and think that he has a ton of value in the regular season even if we aren’t quite able to get the same juice in the playoffs.
Ultimately, I don’t really care that much about how we shake up the end of roster spots that much. These options are really splitting hairs on how OKC saves < $5mi, of which we have pretty clear paths forward. I don’t think either of these options changes their championship odds, especially because they would allow for the Thunder to keep Isaiah Hartenstein for a couple more years.
Conclusion
That’s all I’ve got to say! I wanted to write this to lay out some of the simple (albeit sad and tough) choices OKC can make to continue extending the window of this championship contending core.
I would like to emphasize that everything I’ve said here is not prescriptive, it’s simply describing options that the Thunder could do. Sam Presti has been incredibly pragmatic and patient with regards to team building, and I imagine he doesn’t stray too far from his methods of years past this summer either.
Let me know what you guys think! You can find me at most places on the internet as @ankitpancakes. Here are links to some of those places: Twitter and Bluesky.
Works Cited
Shoutout to the good folks at Spotrac, Bball Ref and my brain for giving me the requisite knowledge to put this together.
Great article! Thanks! Regarding Dort… it seems Presti is the king of preserving assets and not just letting people walk for nothing. So given the good relationship the team has with Dort, I wonder if they could work something out where instead of declining his option, they arrange a trade to a team that then declines and extends him? Get a draft pick or something for him. Win-win for the Thunder and Dort?