Chris Bosh hasn’t played for the Miami Heat since February 9th of last season, which means they’re now eligible to go through the process of collecting insurance on the rest of his contract.
Ira Winderman of the South Florida Sun Sentinel has the full details:
Salary-cap relief won’t come until Feb. 9 at the earliest, but the Miami Heat are now positioned to receive insurance relief from the balance of Chris Bosh’s contract, General Manager Andy Elisburg confirmed Monday to the Sun Sentinel.
With Saturday’s victory over the Washington Wizards at the start of this four-game trip marking 41 consecutive regular-season games missed by Bosh, who failed his preseason physical after missing the second half of the past two seasons due to blood clots, Elisburg confirmed that insurance on the remainder of Bosh’s contract can now come into play.
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The Heat are allowed to apply for an exclusion of Bosh’s salary against the NBA salary cap on Feb. 9, the one-year anniversary of Bosh’s last game played, the date that also began the 41-game calendar for insurance coverage to kick in.
Including this season, Bosh has three fully guaranteed years and around $75.9 million left on his deal. The Heat, per Winderman, Bobby Marks of The Vertical and NBA cap expert Albert Nahmad are eligible to recoup around $41 million of that money.
It is Bosh’s cap hit, however, that the Heat will be more concerned with. There’s another process by which the rest of his contract would come off the books. They would still need to pay him, but his $25.3 million cap hit for next season wouldn’t count against their salary commitments. That, in turn, would allow them to become major free-agency players this summer and, depending on how much they spend in 2017, over each of the following offseasons as well.
Miami still has to go through that procedure, and Bosh can’t sign with another team immediately after, otherwise, I believe, the Heat would then still be on the hook for his actual hit. But you can bet that entirely clearing his salary is now at the top of their priority list.
