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Sixers draft pick Jordan McRae spent a year in Australia after being drafted 58th overall in a deep 2014 draft, with sources indicating that this resulted from a roster crunch after the 76ers acquired Luc Mbah a Moute and Alexey Shved last season. Despite having 17 players under contract, that apparently is not enough of a crunch to ensure McRae gets stashed again.
A source told Liberty Ballers' Jake Pavorsky that the Sixers plan to bring their 2014 second round pick to training camp, as he noted two days ago:
Jordan McRae will be joining the Sixers for training camp, league source says. No deal yet.
— Jake Pavorsky (@JakePavorsky) August 1, 2015
No contract has been agreed to, which is important. The Sixers cannot invite McRae to camp without signing him to a deal and thus no longer having draft rights. If they give him a contract, anticipation is that they'd offer something similar to what their other guards - guys like Scottie Wilbekin and T.J. McConnell - received, at least a partial guarantee in the first year and three nonguaranteed years.
McRae could have forced the team's hand with a contract last summer, as second round picks have the option to take the K.J. McDaniels route and sign a "required tender", a one-year, minimum, non-guaranteed contract. He (and his agent) chose not to. As Dan Feldman noted at NBC Sports' ProBasketballTalk, the Sixers and McRae may have had an understanding after last year's late decision to sign overseas that they'd give McRae a long-term deal in the future.
With 18 players already under contract, and almost all of the "bubble" players with some guaranteed money, the question going forward will be who of those guys makes the roster. The others will likely be designated as "affiliate players" which are assigned to the Sixers D-League team in the case the player joins the D-League.
With guaranteed dollars may have come the promise that they'd stick around in the system, similiar to Drew Gordon and Malcolm Lee last season. Gordon and Lee each had brief stints with the big-league team after being cut in training camp and sent to Delaware.