The Miami Heat may not be ready to give up on forward Jarnell Stokes.
In an effort to get below the NBA’s luxury tax, the Miami Heat had to make some tough decision this past season. They traded both Mario Chalmers and Chris Andersen to the Memphis Grizzlies, waived Beno Udrih and traded Jarnell Stokes to the New Orleans Pelicans.
Of all of them, the Stokes deal seems like a throwaway, though it might have been harder for the Heat to swallow than we originally thought.
According to Cody Taylor at Basketball Insiders, the Heat may have be higher on Stokes than it seemed.
"“I realized that the NBA is very honest,” Stokes told Basketball Insiders. “They believe what they see. It is a business because you have a team like Miami, who was very interested in me and they really liked me. I felt like I could bring some things to the Miami HEAT roster this year that I wasn’t able to showcase and I didn’t really get the opportunity.“[I was traded and then] cut at the trade deadline. They traded [Chris Andersen] and traded another guy and got Joe Johnson; just right then and there you see the business. I have to wake up, 23 years old, and I’m looking at no offers and I have to go play in the D-League. I had offers overseas and things like that, but I was looking at a very good D-League run and that’s where you see a guy grow up because my game really had to mature to get back to this level and you see my perseverance showcased.”"
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Stokes didn’t play much at all–just 14 minutes in five games before being traded–but he was buried on a roster of veterans such as Udonis Haslem, Chris Andersen and Amar’e Stoudemire, not to mention the starters Chris Bosh and Hassan Whiteside.
Stokes was later waived by the Grizzlies and joined Miami’s D-League team the Sioux Falls Skyforce, eventually winning D-League MVP.
The Heat essentially run the Skyforce organization, so bringing him back even in that capacity shows Miami wanted to see more of him. The question now is: Do the Heat want to give him another shot?
There are rules in place against teams re-signing players after trading them away, per Larry Coon’s NBA Salary Cap FAQ:
"A team cannot reacquire a player they traded away during that season (a season being July 1 – June 30). If he is waived by his new team, then he cannot re-sign with his original team until the one-year anniversary of the trade, or until the July 1 following the end of his contract, whichever comes first. However, if a team trades a player’s draft rights, they can reacquire the player during the same season."
Even though the Heat traded Stokes on February 18, his contract expired at the end of the season. Meaning: The Heat could sign him this summer.
Would they?
Well, he was impressive during his D-League stint, the Heat like him, and could be looking for depth this summer as every bigman on the roster is a free agent outside of Bosh and Josh McRoberts. Stokes’ time in Miami may not be over.