Hasheem Thabeet

Oklahoma City - Ryan Gomes and Hasheem Thabeet: The duo have played a combined 68 minutes all season and are redundant on a healthy Thunder team. However, Thabeet plays the more difficult to fill position, and showed enough last season to merit sticking around. If one is to be cut to trim excess spending, it will surely be Gomes.

[...] It would have been very possible for [Xavier] Henry and [Greivis] Vasquez to meet those incentives. A 15 minute-per-game average in at least 70 games played in a season sounds like a lot, but it's not; 176 players in the NBA achieved this last year, including six Grizzlies. Two other Grizzlies damn nearly did it; Hasheem Thabeet (13mpg in 68 games) and DeMarre Carroll (11.2mpg in 71 games), and they did it while playing fairly badly (with PER's of 12.9 and 8.5 respectively).

2) Memphis signed Hasheem Thabeet and DeMarre Carroll to the standard contract of 100% + 20% in likely performance incentives, as recently as last year. They know the protocol, too, and historically have always played by it.

Dante Cunningham

Considering he's always been a power forward in a small forward's body, Cunningham made a pretty decent effort of pretending otherwise. Given plenty of opportunities due to injury, Cunningham shot his customary mid range two's well, rebounding well enough for a man of his size, and proved he could play defense on most small and power forwards. He also turned it over only 25 times all year, leading all rookies in turnover percentage at 6.0%. This is helped significantly by the fact that he doesn't dribble, but nevertheless, it's a hugely impressive number. (Tyler Hansbrough was next lowest at 7.1% in his part-season of work; Marcus Thornton was third at 7.3%. The worst? Jrue Holiday, 21.9%. Then James Johnson. Then Hasheem Thabeet.)