Brooklyn Nets rumors: No qualifying offer for Rondae Hollis-Jefferson

Per a report, the Brooklyn Nets will not extend a qualifying offer to Rondae Hollis-Jefferson, making the longest-tenured Net an unrestricted free agent.

Only one member of the Brooklyn Nets had remained on the roster general manager Sean Marks inherited in February 2016. According to a report, that will no longer be the case come June 30, as the team will not extend a qualifying offer to pending free agent forward Rondae Hollis-Jefferson.

Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN made the report Monday afternoon.

After Brooklyn declines to make a qualifying offer, F Rondae Hollis-Jefferson will become an unrestricted free agent, league sources tell ESPN. Hollis-Jefferson, 24, defends multiple positions well. For now, Nets have $46M in cap space.
— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) June 17, 2019

Because Hollis-Jefferson had only 80 starts in the last two seasons, he fell two short of the required 82 over that period to lock in a higher qualifying offer of $4.92 million.

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But the Nets won’t even extend the smaller $3.59 qualifying offer necessary to retain restricted free agency rights for RHJ, the No. 23 overall selection in the 2015 NBA Draft who was acquired by the Nets in a draft-night trade from the Portland Trail Blazers and had been in Brooklyn for four seasons.

Hollis-Jefferson entered the 2018 offseason projected to start at the power forward spot for the Nets after a breakout campaign in 2017-18 during which he started 59 games and averaged career-highs of 13.9 points, 6.8 rebounds and 2.5 assists per game while shooting a career-best 47.2 percent overall.

While he wasn’t a 3-point threat, RHJ had put together a competent mid-range jumper, knocking down 47.7 percent of his 149 attempts in the 10- to 16-foot range and a solid 44 percent on 50 attempts from 16 feet out to the 3-point line.

That was important for RHJ, because as a finisher in the restricted area, he was at 59.7 percent, attempting 273 shots at the rim.

But an offseason adductor strain sustained in early August while playing in former teammate Jeremy Lin‘s charity game in China started what became an injury-riddled and very disappointing season for Hollis-Jefferson.

The injury was not expected to sideline RHJ for long, but it wound up sidelining him for all of training camp and the preseason and lingered into the opening week of the regular campaign.

He also missed time with an ankle sprain and in late December strained the adductor in his other hip and was out for more than two weeks.

Finally, just after the All-Star break, Hollis-Jefferson was yanked from the rotation and racked up 11 DNP-CDs over the season’s final 22 games.

That wasn’t to say RHJ didn’t have a memorable moment or two, most notably hitting the game-winner as the Nets roared back from a 28-point deficit late in the third quarter to beat the Sacramento Kings on March 19.

Hollis-Jefferson played more in the playoffs, getting into four of the five games in the series as the backup to center Jarrett Allen after Ed Davis went down with a sprained ankle in Game 1 and missed the rest of the series after a short appearance in Game 2.

In that series, RHJ averaged 13.3 points and 3.0 rebounds in 15.5 minutes per game, shooting 48.5 percent overall and 80 percent at the line, highlighted by a 21-point performance as the Nets were eliminated by the Philadelphia 76ers in Game 5.

But that didn’t take away the regression he had during the regular season, when he logged career-lows of 41.1 percent shooting overall, 18.4 percent on roughly one 3-point attempt per game and 64.5 percent at the foul line.

Those numbers were dramatically down from his previous year’s marks of 47.2 percent, 24.1 percent and 78.8 percent, respectively.

The Nets will likely renounce Hollis-Jefferson’s free-agent exception rights after the calendar hits July, meaning Brooklyn will surrender their Bird rights to RHJ. Doing so will clear the $7.41 million cap hold for Hollis-Jefferson.

The Nets are currently projected to be $18 million over the cap, per Jeff Siegel of Early Bird Rights, but that figure includes the cap holds for Brooklyn’s four unrestricted and two restricted free agents, a total of $72.85 million.

The Nets can create a total of $67.59 million under the cap by renouncing all of their free-agent rights (RHJ along with DeMarre Carroll, D’Angelo Russell, Jared Dudley, Davis and Theo Pinson) and waiving the non-guaranteed contracts of Shabazz Napier and Treveon Graham.

Hollis-Jefferson may still have some value because of his defensive skills — his versatility makes him able to guard all five positions, but because the NBA doesn’t have a designated hitter rule, teams will have to take his limited offensive game to get his advanced defensive play.