Jordan McLaughlin is headed back to the Spurs on a one-year minimum-salary contract for the 2026/27 season, a return that keeps San Antonio stocked with another trusted guard for next year. Once the deal is official, he will be the 14th player on the standard roster.
For readers searching his name today, the reason is simple: the contract terms are now in focus. The deal will pay McLaughlin $3.29MM in 2026/27, while San Antonio’s cap hit comes in at $2.45MM, a reminder of how minimum contracts can cost a team more in cash than they count against the cap.
The Spurs chose to bring McLaughlin back even after a modest 2025/26 season in which he played 44 regular season contests and averaged 2.0 points and 0.9 assists in 6.4 minutes per game. That production did not erase the qualities that have kept him in demand: steady ball-handling, clean decisions, and a career assist-to-turnover ratio of 4.2-to-1.
McLaughlin’s path makes the move easy to understand. He went undrafted in 2018 after four years at USC, spent his first professional season in the G League with Brooklyn’s affiliate team, then signed a two-way deal with Minnesota in the 2019 offseason. He spent his first five NBA seasons with the Timberwolves before moving on to Sacramento in the summer of 2024 and then to San Antonio in February 2025 as part of the De'Aaron Fox blockbuster. He re-signed with the Spurs last summer, and now the team is bringing him back again.
The lingering question is not whether McLaughlin can fill minutes. It is what San Antonio wants from him beyond being the 14th player on the standard roster. The numbers say the Spurs are paying for reliability, but the next step will show whether they see him only as depth or as a guard who can matter in bigger moments when the season starts.
