Heat shipping injured former All-Star to Western Conference sleeper

The Miami Heat are offloading reserve shooting guard Victor Oladipo to the Oklahoma City Thunder, sources inform Shams Charania of The Athletic (Twitter link).

Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN tweets that Miami will send Oklahoma City future draft equity along with the veteran wing. The Heat, meanwhile, will net a $9.45M trade exception by flipping his salary.

Earlier this week, the injury-plagued former All-Star picked up his player option for the 2023-24 season. Oladipo tore his left knee patellar tendon during Miami’s first round matchup against the bucks.

Bobby Marks of ESPN (via Twitter) reports that the Thunder will absorb Oladipo’s salary into its available cap space. After the deal, Oklahoma City should still have an estimated $7.2M in available money at its disposal, as well as the $7.8M room midlevel exception. The club currently has 16 players under contract and will need to make more moves to reduce its head count to 15 for the standard roster.

With 11 players currently signed, meanwhile, the Heat now have $172M in committed salary. While Miami is in the luxury tax, it is happily $6.5M beneath the highly-punitive second tax apron.

Should the 31-year-old Oladipo remain with the Thunder, it would represent his second tour of duty with the team. After being drafted by the Magic with the second overall pick out of Indiana in 2013, he spent three seasons with Orlando before being dealt to Oklahoma City in 2016. The Thunder then flipped him to the Indiana Pacers as part of the Paul George trade the following summer. With the Pacers, Oladipo blossomed into a two-time All-Star thanks to a versatile scoring touch and solid perimeter defense.

His major lower-body injury issues first began to plague him in Indiana and he has since been trying to stabilize as a defense-first role player with the Houston Rockets and Heat. During his 42 healthy regular season contests with Miami in 2022/23, the 6-foot-4 vet averaged 10.7 PPG, 3.5 APG, 3.0 RPG and 1.4 SPG in 26.3 MPG, with that production coming mostly off the bench.