Jake Fischer<\/a> of The Stein Line, it is believed within the NBA that the Bucks are the team with the best chance of prying Watson away from the Nuggets.<\/p>\nMilwaukee has a bevy of young players and draft picks to offer, plus a $25.5 million trade exception it can use to absorb Watson’s new salary.<\/p>\n
In order for a sign-and-trade to happen, Fischer noted that the Nuggets want at least two first-round picks in return.<\/p>\n
The possibility of moving on from Watson may have become more real this week when the Nuggets matched the Oklahoma City Thunder’s two-year, $12 million offer sheet to forward Spencer Jones.<\/p>\n
That put the Nuggets into the second salary-cap apron and severely limited their financial flexibility moving forward.<\/p>\n
Watson, 23, enjoyed a breakout season in 2025-26 after primarily being a bench piece for the Nuggets over his first three seasons.<\/p>\n
Of the 54 games Watson played last season, he started a career-high 40 of them, and he has set career marks in points per game (14.6), rebounds per game (4.9), assists per game (2.1), three-pointers made per game (1.5) and minutes per game (29.6).<\/p>\n
Watson was highly efficient offensively as well, shooting 49.1 percent from the field and 41.1 percent from beyond the arc.<\/p>\n
He was fourth on the team in scoring behind Nikola Joki\u0107, Jamal Murray and Aaron Gordon, and it can be argued that Watson is the most important factor in the Nuggets’ success moving forward aside from Joki\u0107 and Murray.<\/p>\n
Denver already lost some important members of last season’s team in Tim Hardaway Jr., Jonas Valan\u010di\u016bnas and Bruce Brown, so they can ill afford to lose another in Watson, especially on the heels of a first-round playoff exit.<\/p>\n
The Nuggets need to be in win-now mode with a three-time NBA MVP in Joki\u0107 on the roster, and keeping Watson in the fold likely provides them with the best chance of contending.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Denver Nuggets reportedly have a contract offer in place for restricted free-agent forward Peyton Watson, who has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":829089,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,590,85],"class_list":["post-829088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=829088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829088\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/829089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=829088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=829088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=829088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}