Utah Jazz waive forward Mike Harris

To be honest, this one doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

The Utah Jazz waiving forward Mike Harris doesn’t exactly cause the blogosphere to stop rotating on its axis, but when a struggling team waives a semi-promising asset mid-season, it’s a bit odd to me. The 30-year-old Harris has toiled in various professional leagues for years after emerging from Rice University, but he’s played for 3 different NBA teams in the last half-decade, and this was his best work.

Harris averaged 4.2 points, 1.7 rebounds, and 0.8 steals per game in 11.3 minutes per contest with Utah, but it was his efficiency numbers (and the eye test) that indicate he was a positive player. In an admittedly small sample size of time, Harris put up an above-average PER of 15.54 with the Jazz, and with the minimal cost that it would’ve taken to keep him coupled with the fact that he was a fringe rotation guy, the reasoning is a bit sketchy.

Best guess? Harris was about to have a guaranteed, full-year deal that Utah didn’t want to pay in route to the lottery, but for any team with playoff hopes and a bench role, he could be a reasonable option moving forward.