Golden State's last two-way job went to a man it did not draft

Trieste opens its Italian league season on Sunday afternoon at the Unipol Forum outside Milan, against Olimpia Milano, and one of its wings is a 22-year-old born in Neptune Beach, Florida whose NBA rights belong to the Golden State Warriors.

Lajae Jones was the 54th pick of the 2026 draft. Golden State had two selections in June, Yaxel Lendeborg at eleven and Jones at fifty-four, and it signed one of them.

The Warriors gave the last contract he might plausibly have signed to a man nobody drafted at all, and the report of it landed the day before Trieste announced him.

Three chairs, and the last one was not empty by accident#

A two-way contract is the cheapest real job in professional basketball. It sits outside the fifteen-man roster, it pays $678,882 this season, which is half the rookie minimum, and the player can be active for up to 50 of his team's 82 regular season games. He cannot play in the postseason unless he is promoted first. Teams may carry three of these and no more.

Golden State had two of its three filled for most of the summer, by L.J. Cryer and Malevy Leons. The third sat open while the club put fifteen standard contracts on the books and then spent the middle of September signing men to camp deals and waiving them again, which is a different exercise with a different purpose.

On September 20, Kenzo Fukuda of ClutchPoints reported that the Warriors were giving that third slot to Graham Ike on a two-year deal. The league's transaction log made it official on the 21st. The club's release said the terms were not disclosed, per team policy. (The terms of a two-way are fixed by the collective bargaining agreement and printed in public, so the policy is guarding a number anybody can look up.)

That is the whole league-wide picture in miniature. Twenty-one of the thirty clubs now have all three two-way slots occupied, and 79 of the 90 slots in the league are taken, with New York holding all three of its own open. (Nine clubs still have a slot free, so none of this was a deadline. It was a preference.) Golden State is not late and it is not early. It simply made a choice, and the choice had a name on it that was not the name it called in June.

Nine games each, on the same roster, in the same gyms#

Here is the part that is not interpretation.

Ike and Jones both played nine games for Golden State this summer, three at the California Classic and six in Las Vegas. Same coaching staff, same teammates, same July.

Ike averaged 10.0 points and 7.2 rebounds in 21.2 minutes across the nine, shooting 48.4 percent. Jones averaged 7.0 points and 3.4 rebounds in 17.1 minutes, shooting 41.0 percent.

Split it by event and Jones looks better in the half that matters more. In Las Vegas he averaged 8.7 points on 48.8 percent shooting, which is a perfectly respectable line for a rookie wing. The California Classic is where his summer went sideways: 3.7 points on 22.2 percent across three games. (Everybody says the Classic means nothing, which holds right up until it is the worse half of the only evidence anyone has on you.) Ike was steadier in both, 10.5 and 8.0 in Vegas and 9.0 and 5.7 at the Classic.

Nine games is nine games. Nobody in that building believes a July rebounding average forecasts a February rotation. But the club was not choosing between these two men in a vacuum, and the thing it was short of is the thing one of them does.

The front court is old, and one of these two is a center#

Golden State's bigs last season: Al Horford played 45 games and is now 40 years old. Kristaps Porzingis played 32 games all season, 15 of them for Golden State after arriving from Atlanta. Draymond Green spends long stretches at center because this team has always asked him to.

Ike is six foot nine and 245 pounds. He spent five college seasons at Wyoming and then Gonzaga, started essentially all of the last four, and averaged 19.9 points and 8.0 rebounds as a fifth-year senior while shooting 56.3 percent. Then he went undrafted on June 24 (five seasons, four of them starting, and sixty names went by), and agreed to an Exhibit 10 camp deal with Golden State that never became official before the two-way did.

Jones is six foot seven and 220 pounds, a wing, on a roster that has Lendeborg and Will Richard and Gui Santos and Moses Moody and Jimmy Butler. Hoops Rumors read Ike's signing as the thing that closed Jones's best path to a spot, and that reading is hard to argue with, because there was exactly one path and somebody else is standing in it.

The part where this is not a tragedy#

Golden State keeps Jones's NBA rights while he plays in Italy. Trieste's general manager, Michael Arcieri, went out of his way to say in the club's announcement that Trieste will work with Warriors staff on Jones's development through the season, which is not a courtesy line. It is the entire architecture of a draft-and-stash, stated out loud by the club paying the salary.

And the Warriors have run this exact play, with this exact draft slot, and it worked.

In 2022 they used the 55th pick on Gui Santos, did not sign him, and let him play another season in Brazil. He reached the NBA in 2023-24 and played eight minutes a night. Last season he started 30 games, averaged 9.2 points, and is on the roster today as a rotation forward the front office is counting on.

Santos is the reason nobody at Chase Center will describe Sunday in Milan as a setback, and he is also the reason the description would be wrong. A second-round pick has no guaranteed anything. The 54th selection buys a team a year of looking, and Golden State has decided to do its looking from six thousand miles away while a big man it liked better takes the chair.

Jones is 22. Ike is 24 and has never played an NBA minute either. Both of those facts will still be true in June.

Called Shots#

Graham Ike appears in at least 20 regular-season games for the Golden State Warriors in 2026-27. Two-way players may be active for up to 50 of 82 games, so the rule is not what decides this. Golden State gave him two years rather than one, which is the maximum term available and reads as intent. And the front court he sits behind is thin in a measurable way: Al Horford played 45 games last season and is 40, and Kristaps Porzingis played 32 across two clubs. The case against is the better half of the argument. Draymond Green plays center whenever this team asks him to, which is the cheapest answer to a missing big and costs nothing. Yaxel Lendeborg was the eleventh pick in June and will take front-court minutes before a two-way does. Clubs ration two-way appearances on purpose rather than spending them in November, because 50 is a ceiling and not an allowance. And 20 games is a quarter of a season for a man who has never played an NBA minute. Scored off his regular-season games-played total, which is final after the season ends on April 11, 2027. Play-in and playoff appearances do not count, and exactly 20 is right.

Sources#

Ike's two-way signing from the NBA's official transaction log, team filter, and from the Warriors' own release; the two-year term reported by Kenzo Fukuda of ClutchPoints via Hoops Rumors. Golden State's three two-way players and the league-wide count of filled slots from Hoops Rumors' 2026-27 two-way tracker, updated September 21 and read on September 22, which is also the source for the three-slot limit, the 50-game activation cap, the $678,882 salary, the two-year maximum term and the postseason ineligibility. Jones's signing, his date and place of birth, his height and weight and his college path from Pallacanestro Trieste's own announcement of September 21, including the Arcieri quotation. Jones as the 54th pick and Lendeborg as the eleventh from NBA.com's 2026 draft board, both rounds read in full; Ike appears nowhere in the 60 selections. Summer League games, minutes, scoring, rebounding and shooting for both men, split between the California Classic and Las Vegas, from RealGM's summer league records. Ike's college seasons and rates from Sports Reference's college basketball record. Horford's 45 games and his age, and Porzingis's 32 games split 17 with Atlanta and 15 with Golden State, from Basketball-Reference. Gui Santos as the 55th pick of 2022 and his three NBA seasons, including 68 games and 30 starts at 9.2 points last season, from Basketball-Reference. Trieste's September 27 opener at Milan from the club's own schedule.