I waited on reporting on Ty Jerome because I assumed the Houston Rockets, who acquired the UVA basketball alum in a trade with the Oklahoma City Thunder, were then going to waive him, and turns out, bad news, that’s what happened.
Jerome, a 2019 first-round draft pick, is now a free agent, at kind of a bad time to be a free agent, with NBA teams already in training camp, making it harder for guys without a team to find one.
His days were clearly numbered in OKC, which had acquired Jerome as part of the deal that sent Chris Paul to Phoenix in 2020.
In his first year in Oklahoma City, Jerome averaged 10.7 points per game and shot 42.3 percent from three, numbers that suggested a long NBA future for him.
But then OKC took a pair of guards in the 2021 draft, Josh Giddey and Tre Mann, and Jerome ended up falling behind both, and behind second-round picks Aaron Wiggins and Jeremiah Robinson-Earl, on the depth chart at guard.
Last year, Jerome’s numbers were down to 7.1 points and 2.3 assists per game in 2021-2022, and he only shot 29.0 percent from three-point range, a troubling number for an NBA combo guard.
Jerome was due to make $4.2 million this year in the fourth year of his rookie deal, making him expendable for an OKC team that is still early in its latest rebuild.
That the only value the Thunder front office could find with him was to shop his contract around the league for a team looking to shed salary-cap space is not a good sign.
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Chris Graham
