Report: Peyton Watson ‘weighing’ playing 2026-27 season on qualifying offer

The Denver Nuggets might get Peyton Watson back this season on a huge discount.

That was the headline from Marc Stein’s report that came out late Sunday night.

The veteran NBA insider says that Watson “has been weighing the unappealing prospect of playing out the 2026-27 season on a qualifying offer with the intent to become an unrestricted free agent next summer. Actually doing so, mind you, means leaving millions on the table.”

Denver gave Peyton Watson a qualifying offer last month for roughly $6.5 million, ensuring he’d be a restricted free agent this summer. That would give the Nuggets the flexibility to match an offer sheet if Watson signed with another team.

And the front office has shown a willingness to do just that, matching a two-year, $12 million contract for Spencer Jones from the Thunder on Sunday. That move put the Nuggets into the second apron, the NBA’s only team currently there, and greatly increased repeater tax penalties.

ESPN’s Shams Charania reported that the Hawks, Bucks and Clippers continue to pursue Peyton Watson, hoping to lure him away.

The latest from Stein suggests that Watson may turn down a lucrative payday this time around in order to hit the open market in July of 2027. It’d be risky betting on himself, but Watson broke out last season for the Nuggets — particularly when Nikola Jokic was hurt and missed basically a month.

If Denver can indeed get Watson to put pen to paper on the qualifying offer, only $6.5 million, that’d be a big win. The Nuggets would be essentially running it back, hoping to squeeze another title out of Nikola Jokic and this current core.

We’ll see how it all shakes out, but the notion Peyton Watson is going to sign a contract worth more than $100 million this offseason is no longer a guarantee.

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