In what seems like a cruel joke, the Nuggets’ backup center situation has devolved back into chaos, 48 hours after the team thought it had finally found a dependable solution.
Jonas Valanciunas has been lured into considering a return to the EuroLeague, where the Greek club Panathinaikos has offered him a three-year contract worth $13 million, according to a report by BasketNews.
One problem: Valanciunas is under contract in the NBA. For $10.4 million next season, to be precise.
The Nuggets traded Dario Saric to the Sacramento Kings on Tuesday to acquire the 33-year-old Lithuanian big man, spurring new optimism within the organization about the future of Nikola Jokic’s dreaded minutes on the bench. Valanciunas has been a starter for most of his career, averaging 13.1 points and 9.3 rebounds in 937 NBA games.
Now that he’s mulling over his future, a nightmare outcome looms over Denver with most free-agent centers off the board.
The Nuggets are aware of the dilemma, but their next steps were unclear as of Thursday afternoon.
Here are the elements at play in a fluid situation that Ben Tenzer and Jon Wallace will be tasked with navigating:
• Denver’s trade for Valanciunas cannot be finalized by the league office until Sunday. Technically, Valanciunas is still a Sacramento King, even though the deal has been agreed upon.
• Even so, the Nuggets might not want to make efforts to rescind the trade because it benefited them in two ways: They added a rotation player, but they also got rid of Saric’s $5.4 million salary for 2025-26. Saric would have been the team’s sixth-most expensive player despite having appeared in only 16 games last season.
• On Sacramento’s end, the trade created cap space to sign Dennis Schroder in an already agreed-on deal. With these elements in mind, a league source told The Denver Post the trade will likely go through, still, whatever happens next.
• The Nuggets hold the cards, not Valanciunas. He has an NBA contract to honor, and he cannot walk away by simply signing a different contract in another league. The two parties would have to work out an agreement to release him from his deal.
• The Nuggets are not incentivized to simply waive Valanciunas in order to grant his potential wishes of playing elsewhere, because his salary would become dead cap space. In all likelihood, Valanciunas would have to willingly forfeit some or all of his remaining NBA contract to reach a buyout agreement.
• Valanciunas has a team option in his contract next offseason, before the last year of his deal. The Nuggets could attempt to convince Valanciunas to stay in the NBA, even for just one more season, on the condition that they buy him out in 2026 and free him of his obligations in North America.
• If they do go that route, the risk of failing to convince him is a serious threat. Very few centers remain on the open market. Al Horford and Chris Boucher are among the limited options, but other teams can openly negotiate with them.
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