On Wednesday, August 26, Shams Charania reported that Bennedict Mathurin had agreed to a two-year, $16 million contract with the New Orleans Pelicans, with a player option on the second season. On most NBA next-team boards, that sentence would be the whole story: report lands, price runs to a dollar, everyone goes home. This board earned a longer look, because the price it spent August showing was never really about basketball. Kalshi's market closed the prior session with the LA Clippers at 59 cents, not because anyone believed the Clippers had won Mathurin over, but because he was a restricted free agent and they held the $8.8 million qualifying offer that made him one. The market was pricing a cage. Mathurin's camp picked the lock, and by Wednesday evening New Orleans, a 21-cent contract a session earlier, was bid at 99 cents against a 100-cent ask.
That flip is worth walking through slowly, because it teaches something the DeRozan settlement and the Kuminga repricing each only half-showed: what a next-team market does when the biggest input is not a roster move or a money fight but a procedural right, held by a team, that the player has to negotiate his way out of. There is also a number at the bottom of this page about how much of this board's entire trading life happened in its final day, and it says something about thin markets that even the DeRozan tape never had to.
The Quick Answer
Bennedict Mathurin's next team is the New Orleans Pelicans. He agreed to a two-year, $16 million deal with a player option on August 26, after his representatives approached the Clippers about withdrawing the $8.8 million qualifying offer that had kept him restricted. As of Wednesday evening, Kalshi's board has priced the question as answered: New Orleans is bid at 99 cents against a 100-cent ask, while the Clippers, a 59-cent contract at the prior close, and Chicago, a 19-cent contract, are both down to a one-cent last trade with no standing bid.
- The Winner: New Orleans, which closed the prior session at 21 cents
- The Favorite That Lost: the Clippers at 59 cents, a price built on restriction mechanics rather than mutual interest
- What The Gambit Bought: a consent-based withdrawal of the qualifying offer, roughly comparable first-year money, a player option, and Mathurin's choice of situation
- The Volume Line: 11,065 of the New Orleans leg's 11,939 lifetime contracts traded in its final 24 hours, on a board whose own lifetime total is 13,979
Where the money sat before the signing, what the qualifying-offer maneuver actually changed, and what New Orleans' crowded backcourt does with him now are all below.
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The Board, Before And After
The whole story fits in one table: every leg that ever carried a real price, at the prior session's close and after the news. One conversion keeps it legible: each contract settles at $1.00 if the outcome happens and $0.00 if it does not, so a 99-cent bid reads as roughly a 99 percent implied chance, and under this market's rules settlement follows once the league makes the transaction official.
| Outcome | After the news (Aug 26) | Prior close | Lifetime volume |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Orleans | 99¢ bid / 100¢ ask | 21¢ | 11,939 |
| LA Clippers | 0¢ bid / 5¢ ask, last 1¢ | 59¢ | 713 |
| Chicago | 0¢ bid / 1¢ ask, last 1¢ | 19¢ | 773 |
| Milwaukee | 0¢ bid / 1¢ ask, last 1¢ | 3¢ | 333 |
| Detroit | 0¢ bid / 1¢ ask, last 5¢ | 5¢ | 15 |
| 26 Other Legs, Incl. Retires/No Team (Each) | 0¢ bid / 1¢ ask | ≤1¢ | ≤34 |
Quotes captured the evening of August 26, 2026, from Kalshi's public market data. A raw board sums to more than 100 cents, so read single prices as approximations of probability, not exact percentages; how Kalshi's cents convert to real odds walks the full conversion. Prices move constantly; this is a snapshot, not advice.
The Clippers row is the one to sit with. A 59-cent favorite that collapses to a one-cent print usually means a bidding war lost or a trade that fell through. This one means neither. Nobody outbid the Clippers, because the Clippers were never really bidding; their 59 cents was the market's estimate that the machinery of restricted free agency would simply run its course. And notice Detroit while you are here: a five-cent last trade still sitting on the tape with no bid behind it and 15 contracts of lifetime volume. That is the same fossil the Kuminga board keeps producing, a print from another era of the board that nobody can actually trade against, and on a book this thin it is most of what the long tail consists of.
Why The Cage Was Worth 59 Cents
To see what the market was pricing, rewind to how Mathurin became a Clipper at all. On February 5, Indiana sent him to Los Angeles in the Ivica Zubac trade, a deal in which the Pacers packaged Mathurin, Isaiah Jackson, two first-round picks and a second-rounder for Zubac and Kobe Brown. Mathurin was averaging 17.8 points a game at the time, and the change of scenery treated him badly in one specific way: his three-point shot vanished. He hit 37.2 percent on 5.6 attempts a game in Indiana, and 20.7 percent on 3.2 attempts across 26 games with the Clippers, even as his scoring and rebounding held steady.
So the summer arrived with a 24-year-old former No. 6 pick coming off career highs of 17.6 points, 5.4 rebounds and 2.4 assists, and a shooting stretch ugly enough to complicate his market. Los Angeles tendered the $8.8 million qualifying offer, which made him a restricted free agent: any outside offer sheet, the Clippers could match. From there, every mechanical path led back to Los Angeles. Sign an offer sheet, the Clippers can match it. Sign nothing, and the qualifying offer is the fallback. Pre-signing coverage was already framing a return to the Clippers as close to inevitable, and the market agreed in cents: 59 on the Clippers at the prior close, with New Orleans at 21 and Chicago at 19 splitting most of what remained.
That 21-cent New Orleans price deserves its own sentence, because it was not a dart throw. Per ESPN's reporting, the Pelicans had pursued Mathurin aggressively for over a year. The interest was real and evidently visible enough to price; what kept it from being the favorite was that interest alone cannot beat a match right. On a restricted board, the rights-holder's price is a statement about the rules, and rules do not usually lose.
What The Qualifying-Offer Gambit Actually Bought
This time the rules moved. The deadline for the Clippers to unilaterally rescind the qualifying offer passed on July 13, but a team can still withdraw one after that with the player's consent, and that is exactly the mechanism Mathurin's camp used: per Charania, his representatives approached the Clippers about pulling the $8.8 million offer, which dissolves the restriction and makes him an ordinary unrestricted free agent. That withdrawal was the whole ballgame. Hoops Rumors noted the Clippers had not formally pulled the offer as of Wednesday evening but were expected to work with Mathurin on it, and the market plainly treats it as done: it is the move that turned a 59-cent Clippers contract into a one-cent print without a single competing offer sheet ever being filed.
It is worth being precise about what Mathurin gained, because the headline numbers hide it. His first-year salary in New Orleans comes to roughly $7.8 million by Hoops Rumors' cap math, which is slightly less than the $8.8 million the qualifying offer would have paid him to stay in Los Angeles, and both paths reached unrestricted free agency in the summer of 2027. What the qualifying offer could not give him was anything beyond next June: no security if he gets hurt, no say in his situation, another year in a system where his three-point shot had just cratered. The New Orleans structure keeps the bet-on-himself timeline, declining the player option makes him unrestricted next summer, and adds the two things the QO lacked: a second season that is his call alone, and a team that wanted him specifically, at a role worth rebuilding his value in. Charania's framing was that the deal effectively turned the qualifying offer into a more favorable situation with added security, and the cap math says that is almost literally what happened. Side by side, the trade he made is narrow and deliberate:
| The qualifying offer (Clippers) | The Pelicans deal | |
|---|---|---|
| Year-One Salary | $8.8 million | $7.8 million (est.) |
| Second Season | None; free agent after one year | Player option, his decision |
| 2027 Free Agency | Unrestricted | Unrestricted, if he declines the option |
| The Situation | The incumbent, after a 20.7% three-point stretch | A team that chased him for a year |
Contract figures per ESPN and Hoops Rumors reporting, August 26, 2026. The QO salary is the tendered $8.8 million; the year-one Pelicans figure is Hoops Rumors' cap estimate.
The road not taken is what Chicago's 19 cents was pricing. The Bulls, Bucks and Mavericks all pursued him with longer terms and more total money, per Hoops Rumors, so the top price among the outside suitors was tracking real offers with bigger headline numbers and more team control attached. Kalshi's crowd had the suitors right and the contract shape wrong. Mathurin took the shortest deal on the table, which is the one outcome a board full of total-dollars logic prices worst. Callback to the table above: the reason the Clippers' 59 cents died without a fight is the same reason Chicago's 19 cents did. Both prices assumed someone other than the player would decide this, the team holding the match right or the team offering the most money, and the actual decision came down to the one input a next-team market never gets a clean read on, which is what the player himself is optimizing for.
The Day The Board Did Its Whole Life's Business
Now the number I keep coming back to. When the New Orleans contract ran from its 21-cent close to a 99-cent bid, 11,065 contracts traded on that leg in 24 hours. The leg's lifetime total is 11,939. Ninety-three percent of every New Orleans contract ever traded on this board changed hands in the final day, and the board as a whole did 11,457 of its 13,979 lifetime contracts in the same window. For scale, the DeRozan board's settling wave was half the winning leg's lifetime volume, and that Denver leg alone had traded 90,220 contracts over its life, more than six times this entire market.
The tape in one line: 82 percent of everything this board ever traded happened in the board's final day. The 59-cent favorite was an opinion backed by 713 lifetime contracts.
Put plainly: this board barely existed until the answer arrived. Through three weeks of August it was a scoreboard, a place where a handful of traders kept a running estimate of the restriction math, and the moment the news broke it briefly became a market, one-way traffic buying the settled answer at 99 cents to collect the last penny. The settlement shape itself was textbook, the same one the Klay Thompson board printed: one leg spiking while every sibling dies to a no-bid quote at the same moment, which is how a real answer looks and how a glitch never does. But the volume context matters for anyone reading these boards going forward. A 59-cent favorite on 713 lifetime contracts is a considered opinion held by very few people, and it deserved exactly as much deference as it got.
The Pelicans' Side Of The Ledger
The Pelicans' side of this is the part that outlives the market. They committed real minutes, not just money, to a 24-year-old they had chased for over a year, and they did it while staying under the luxury tax, a line they entered the day about $5.77 million below. Squeezing Mathurin's roughly $7.8 million first-year number under it likely forces a follow-on move, and Hoops Rumors points at Jordan Hawkins and his $7 million expiring deal as the trade candidate most often cited. Watch that name; this signing probably is not the last transaction of the New Orleans summer.
The fit question is real, and it is about the backcourt crowd. New Orleans already runs Dejounte Murray, Jordan Poole and 2025 lottery pick Jeremiah Fears at guard, and Mathurin's cleanest NBA skill, getting to his spots and scoring in volume off the bench, overlaps with Poole's job description more than it complements it. He averaged 17.5 points per game off the bench last season, the highest bench scoring rate in the league among players with at least 20 such games, and that sixth-man-with-starter-talent profile is presumably the role New Orleans is buying: instant offense behind a young core, with 25 starts of last-season experience if injuries bite. The wing rotation he joins is anchored by Trey Murphy III, who led the team at 21.5 points a game last season and whose own next-team board spent August quoting the stay-in-New-Orleans contract at 85 cents while the front office rejected offers. Read together, the two boards describe one coherent front-office summer: the Pelicans spent it keeping their leading scorer and adding a second young volume scorer behind him, at a combined cost that never crossed the tax line.
For Mathurin, the basketball case is simple: a team that wanted him, a role that suits his one elite skill, and a season to prove the Clippers' 20.7 percent was the aberration and Indiana's 37.2 was the truth. If he does, he hits unrestricted free agency next summer at 25 with the leverage the qualifying offer never offered. If he does not, the player option is the floor he bought.
How To Read The Next Restricted Board
Every settled board in this series leaves a lesson, and this one's is specific: restriction is a price, and player agency is its blind spot.
- On A Restricted Free Agent's Board, The Incumbent's Price Is The Rules, Not The Relationship. The Clippers at 59 cents never meant the Clippers were winning; it meant the machinery defaulted to them. Before you take a rights-holder's price at face value, ask how much of it is affection and how much is procedure.
- Procedural Prices Die Procedurally. This board did not need a trade or a bidding war to flip; it needed one consent-based withdrawal. The catalysts that resolve a restricted board are often paperwork, and paperwork does not leak to the tape the way roster moves do, which is why the DeRozan-style early tell never appeared here. New Orleans closed at 21 the session before it closed at 99.
- Weight A Thin Board's Opinion By Its Volume. A 13,979-contract lifetime market is a poll of a small room. The settlement shape, every sibling leg dying at once, is trustworthy on any board; the standing prices before the news deserve skepticism in proportion to how few contracts stand behind them.
- Total Dollars Is The Market's Favorite Wrong Answer. Chicago's 19 cents priced the biggest offer, not the likeliest choice. Players optimizing for timeline and role over headline money is a repeating pattern these boards keep mispricing, and it will repeat.
Transaction markets like this live on Kalshi rather than a sportsbook, so OddsShopper's tools do not carry them, and there is no second book to shop a next-team price against; the only line-shopping available on this board was reading its own bid and ask, and the mechanics of these yes/no contracts are covered in how to bet NBA on Kalshi. The pricing discipline transfers, though. Comparing a quote to the probability you can actually defend is the same habit our live odds screen is built for on NBA game lines, shopping the number across every major book before you take a price, and our free expert picks apply it to live slates every day.
The Bottom Line
The Bennedict Mathurin next-team market spent its whole life pricing a set of rules, and the player negotiated his way out of them. The Clippers' 59 cents was a bet on restriction machinery running its course; New Orleans' 21 was a bet on a year of documented pursuit finding a way; and the way it found was a consent-based qualifying-offer exit that cost Mathurin about a million dollars of first-year salary and bought him a player option, a chosen situation, and the same express lane to 2027 free agency. The board answered the way settled boards do, one leg at 99 cents and thirty dead quotes, with 82 percent of its lifetime volume arriving after the question was effectively over. New Orleans gets its second young scorer of the summer; the tax math points at one more move to come. For the boards still open, the NBA next-team odds hub tracks the remaining names, the Kuminga board is the live one worth watching this week, and the daily Kalshi picks page grades a fresh board every morning.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What team did Bennedict Mathurin sign with?
The New Orleans Pelicans. Mathurin agreed to a two-year, $16 million contract with a player option on Wednesday, August 26, 2026, first reported by Shams Charania of ESPN. His representatives approached the LA Clippers about withdrawing the $8.8 million qualifying offer that had made him a restricted free agent, which cleared the way for the New Orleans deal.
Why were the Clippers the favorite on Kalshi's Mathurin next-team market?
Because restricted free agency points that way by default. The Clippers held Mathurin's $8.8 million qualifying offer and the right to match outside offers, so the most mechanically likely outcomes all ended with him in Los Angeles. Kalshi closed the prior session at 59 cents on the Clippers. The board was pricing the rules, and the rules changed when Mathurin's camp approached the Clippers about withdrawing it by consent.
Has the Kalshi Mathurin market officially settled?
As of Wednesday evening, August 26, 2026, the market is still listed as active, with an expected expiration of October 21, 2026; under its rules it resolves early once the league makes the transaction official. The pricing already reflects the outcome: New Orleans is bid at 99 cents against a 100-cent ask, and every other team is quoted with no bid. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange, open to traders 18 and older where legal, and availability varies by state.
How close did Chicago come to signing Mathurin?
Close enough to earn a real price. The Bulls, along with the Bucks and Mavericks, pursued Mathurin with longer-term offers carrying more total money, per Hoops Rumors, and Chicago's contract closed the prior session at 19 cents, the highest price among the outside suitors chasing him. The offers were real; what the market underweighted was that Mathurin would choose the shortest path back to free agency over the biggest total number.
Market quotes and volume figures captured the evening of August 26, 2026, from Kalshi's public market data; contract and free-agency details per ESPN's Shams Charania and Hoops Rumors reporting of the same day. Prices move constantly. This article describes market prices and reporting; it does not recommend any position and is not financial advice.
