Every year during the training camp in the days leading up to the start of another season, the Indiana Pacers and all the other NBA franchises will announce a few team signings and then a day or two later or perhaps just hours later they’ve waived those same players.
This week the Pacers did this when they signed Darius McGhee, Kyle Mangas, and Reid Travis to contracts on Monday—complete with a one-sentence press release—and then waived them on Wednesday. Earlier this month, the Pacers did the same thing with guys that have real NBA experience in Jordan Bell and Elfrid Payton. It happens often enough that you may find yourself wondering, “What was the point of that?”
In essence it’s a way to give some of the players that will be playing for the Indiana Mad Ants (still feels wrong to not type Ft. Wayne there) more money than they would otherwise receive in a standard G-League contract, and this helps entice those players to play in the G-League instead of looking overseas for higher paying gigs. The contracts that these players are signing are called Exhibit-10 contracts. Players who sign Exhibit 10 deals are eligible for a bonus if they play for the NBA team’s G League affiliate for at least 60 days after being waived. For the 2023-24 season, that bonus can be worth up to $75,000. A standard G-League contract is worth $40,500 (as of last season) so these bonuses can more than double the amount that G-League athletes can earn. No small amount of money for these guys.
Sometimes you will see Exhibit-10 players stick around during training camp and get a chance to play in some preseason games before being waived. If they impress during these stretches and teams decide they want to keep them, their contracts can be converted into a standard NBA veteran minimum contract or a 2-way contract if the player is eligible for one. This is generally a rare occurrence and the majority of the time these contracts are signed with both sides fully knowing the final outcome will be that the player play for the team’s G-League affiliate and will not be with the NBA franchise.
If you are curious about those recent players that will be with the Mad Ants, Darius McGhee is a rookie out of Liberty that played a few games for the Pacers in Las Vegas during Summer League. Kyle Mangas is an Indiana native and played four years Indiana Wesleyan University. He’s spent the last two seasons playing in Lithuania and the Czech Republic. Reid Travis played at Kentucky in college and has spent the last four years overseas in Japan and Germany.
iPacers 
Enlightening!
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