The Jerami Grant trade surprised everybody, even though it shouldn’t have.
Before the trade, the Denver Nuggets were sitting roughly $12.5 million below the luxury tax line with limited ability to improve the roster. The only major avenues toward roster improvement were the full mid-level exception (an option for teams over the salary cap to use in free agency when upgrading their roster worth roughly $9.2 million this season) and the traded player exceptions created from last offseason’s money saving moves including the trades of Kenneth Faried, Darrell Arthur, and Wilson Chandler.