Wizards sign Otto Porter after matching Nets’ 4-year, $106 million offer sheet

The Washington Wizards have matched the Brooklyn Nets offer sheet on restricted free agent Otto Porter, according to The Washington Post’s Candace Buckner. He will remain with the Wizards on a four-year deal worth $106 million, a contract the Nets structured to include a 15-percent trade kicker and 50 percent of each season’s salary due on Oct. 1.

The official matching of the offer sheet will not happen until Porter passes his physical next week, according to TNT’s David Aldridge.

Porter was one of the most coveted free agents this summer after a promising season in Washington. He averaged 13.4 points and 6.4 rebounds on 43.4 percent shooting from three-point range, emerging as a necessary member of a Wizards team that finished the regular season with the East’s third-best record.

The Wizards were expected to match any competing offer on Porter’s services. With $93 million in guaranteed salaries for this season, Washington would have been unable to make a competitive offer on another premier free agent forward. The collective bargaining agreement, however, allows teams to exceed the salary cap — at the cost of a luxury tax bill — to re-sign their own free agents, regardless of their payroll.

Washington now moves forward with building around a core of John Wall, Bradley Beal and Porter for at least the next two years. That’s when Wall becomes an unrestricted free agent and can sign with any team.

Porter has improved drastically from downtown each of his four seasons in the NBA. He entered the league a 19-percent three-point shooter but has put in the work to more than doubled his efficiency. The lanky forward has also developed as a scorer off the dribble, a skill Washington needs him to continue honing as they attempt to advance past the second round of the playoffs.

With guaranteed contracts for Porter, Wall, Beal, Markieff Morris, Marcin Gortat and Ian Mahinmi through 2019, Washington will be unable to improve via free agency unless another the NBA is blasted by another unpredictable cap spike in the near future. For this reason, it is betting on developing the 24-year-old forward into one of the league’s premier players of the future.

Brooklyn has a history of swinging and missing on restricted free agents, and this summer is no different. The Nets threw massive offer sheets at Allen Crabbe and Tyler Johnson last summer, and those were matched. Porter’s was, too.

But now, Brooklyn can shift its efforts to signing Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, who was a restricted free agent before the Pistons renounced his rights and made him unrestricted.

The Nets were expected to throw max offer sheets at one of either Pope or Porter this summer. They were unable to make an offer on Pope earlier, though, because their money was tied up with the max offer to Porter. Now that Washington has matched, the coast is clear for Brooklyn to throw a huge offer at Pope to continue their youth movement.

The Nets were forced to swap picks with the Boston Celtics, so they didn’t have the No. 1 pick their league-worst record warranted. But they scored a lottery pick by trading Brook Lopez for D’Angelo Russell and Timofey Mozgov before the NBA Draft.

Now, even though it struck out on Porter, Brooklyn has an opportunity to add another young perimeter scorer to help jumpstart its rebuilding process.