The Warriors Have Stopped Paying Kristaps Porzingis: What “Not Rendering Services” Means
The Golden State Warriors have stopped sending Kristaps Porzingis his paychecks. Nobody is calling it a punishment. The team is treating it as bookkeeping.
ESPN’s Anthony Slater and Shams Charania reported Wednesday that the Warriors are withholding semimonthly payments on Porzingis’ $20 million salary, with league sources saying the club has ruled he is not rendering his services. Per those same sources, Porzingis is not disputing it.
The San Francisco Chronicle’s Luca Evans laid out the mechanism. The collective bargaining agreement allows a team to reduce salary for games missed when a player fails to render the services his contract requires without a reasonable excuse. ESPN’s Bobby Marks pegged the deduction at one 91.6th of salary per game, which works out to roughly $218,341 every time Golden State plays and Porzingis does not.
The Warriors have played eight games. He has played none of them.
What is actually known about the absence
Very little, and that matters.
On Oct. 14 the Warriors announced Porzingis would be out indefinitely with an undisclosed health-related matter. They said he had met with general manager Mike Dunleavy Jr. and Dr. Rick Celebrini, the team’s vice president of player health and performance, and that the details of that meeting would stay private. He had already missed training camp and the first five preseason games, and he has not been at the facility since early October.
The thing that changed before the money did was paperwork. ESPN reported the Warriors purposefully switched his designation from general illness to not with team, which means the absence is no longer treated as excused.
Porzingis himself has said almost nothing. In an Oct. 14 post he wrote that he is “working with doctors and experts to figure out how to be fully back to good health ASAP,” and asked people to stop guessing: “I appreciate all the internet doctors trying to diagnose and help, but I’m in the best hands.” He told The Athletic in October 2025 that he had been diagnosed with POTS, a condition that affects heart rate and blood pressure. Whether that is what is keeping him out now has not been disclosed by the player or the team.
No diagnosis has been reported for this absence. No grievance has been filed. There is no suspension, no fine and no disciplinary action of any kind on record. A players association spokesperson declined to comment to CBS Sports. Steve Kerr, asked for an update on Oct. 28, said “I don’t know.” The Warriors have issued no statement about the withheld pay at all.
Ben Simmons is the map for how this normally goes
The 76ers withheld close to $20 million from Simmons in 2021-22 on the same theory, docking roughly $360,000 per game. Simmons and the players association filed a grievance in April 2022. It settled that August before an arbitrator ruled, with the terms kept quiet.
The difference is that Simmons fought it. Porzingis, according to ESPN’s sourcing, does not plan to. That is the detail that tells you where this is heading, because ESPN also reported he leans toward ending his NBA career.
Golden State can absorb this, which makes it easier
The Warriors opened 0-3 and have since won five straight. The $20 million counts against their cap whether they write the checks or not, and team sources say there are no current plans to void the contract. They can trade him up to the Feb. 11 deadline, and withholding pay does not change that.
Porzingis is 31. He arrived in February 2026 from Atlanta in exchange for Jonathan Kuminga and Buddy Hield, played 15 games, averaged 16.1 points, then re-signed in June for two years and $40 million with only $3 million guaranteed in the second year. He won a title in Boston in 2024 and carries career averages of 19.5 points, 7.6 rebounds and 1.8 blocks.
None of that is in question. What is happening to him right now is, and nobody involved is willing to explain it.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
