Nuggets rival Clippers sign different Denver player than you think

No, the Clippers didn’t sign Peyton Watson. Not yet, anyway.

Los Angeles agreed to a two-way deal with guard Jalen Pickett on Wednesday, league sources told HoopsHype’s Michael Scotto. The 26-year-old has spent his entire three-year pro career in Denver after the Nuggets selected him 32nd overall in the 2023 draft out of Penn State.

Pickett will earn up to $678,882 on the deal and can appear in as many as 50 regular season games for a Clippers franchise that has been among the teams circling Watson in restricted free agency this summer, along with Milwaukee, Cleveland and Atlanta.

Across 126 games in a Nuggets uniform, Pickett averaged 4 points, 1.9 assists and 1.6 rebounds on 43% shooting and 39% from deep. He had some moments — a 29-point eruption in Philadelphia against Joel Embiid, a triple-double during his sophomore season — but he never carved out a consistent role under Michael Malone in his first two seasons and became a flash point in the friction between the coach and GM Calvin Booth, a fellow Penn State man who believed in Pickett more than the coaching staff did. Malone preferred Collin Gillespie, who initially signed a two-way deal with the Suns before exploding into one of the league’s best deep-ball shooters, earning a $48 million deal this summer.

Denver declined Pickett’s $2.4 million team option this summer and chose not to tender him a qualifying offer, making him an unrestricted free agent.

The move to the Clippers is whatever. But it is official that another ball handler is out the door when that was a stated target of the offseason by the executives. Let alone that, four of the Nuggets’ top 12 players by minutes played last season — Tim Hardaway Jr. Bruce Brown, Jonas Valanciunas and Pickett — are gone. That’s roughly 5,800 minutes of action that walked out the door. And that number could balloon significantly if Watson, who played over 1,500 minutes before his hamstring shut him down, ends up elsewhere too.

Denver has replaced some of that production with Marvin Bagley III, Alpha Diallo and draft picks Trevon Brazile and Bryce Hopkins. But as noted here last month, the long-known ball handling issue hasn’t been addressed, and the Nuggets are running it back with Tyus Jones and Julian Strawther as their second-unit guards — bumping them up from third stringers.

The Watson saga remains the offseason’s main event as the sides continue to duke it out while Denver holds most of the leverage.

For Pickett, landing in L.A. on a two-way is a chance to stay in the league. For the Nuggets, it’s another quiet departure in a summer full of them — and a reminder that the roster around Nikola Jokic looks thinner than it did a year ago.

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