Current Trade Kickers

June 11th, 2010

Trade kickers are a salary mechanism that increase a player’s salary when they are traded. They are both important and difficult to accommodate when formulating trade scenarios, and thus it’s useful for them to be known. Kickers – technically known as trade bonuses, but colloquially as kickers, which we’ll stick with here – can only be bothersome to teams and emphatically benefit a player. As such, they’re far from commonplace. But there’s enough of them out there, and it helps to know about them. Contrary to some belief, trade kickers can not be waived. Not recreationally, at least. A player cannot waive a trade kicker just to make their contract look more desirable. Only in one specific circumstance can a trade kicker (or part of one) be waived; when a player has to waive some money to make a particular trade connotation meet the rules of trade finances. This rarely happens, because it obviously requires the player’s permission, although it did happen just this year after Devin Brown vetoed a trade to Minnesota when he refused to waive his. Doesn’t happen much, though. There follows a list of all current NBA contracts that feature trade kickers, along with the value of them. Note that trade kickers have no expiry date other than the expiration of the contract itself, and that having a percentage listed means that’s the percentage of their remaining salary that they will additionally get with the bonus. – Carmelo Anthony (lesser of 5% or $1 million) – Ron Artest (15%) – Andrea Bargnani (5%) – Charlie Bell (15%) – Shannon Brown (15%) – Kobe Bryant (10%) – Jose Calderon (10%) – Eddy Curry (greater of 15% or $5 million) – Sam Dalembert (15%) – Tim Duncan (15%) – Jeff Foster (lesser of 15% or $1 million) – […]