The National Basketball Association announced Monday its affiliation system for the 2014-15 NBA Development League season. Each NBA team has one NBA D-League affiliate to which it may assign players. Toronto, along with 12 other teams, will be affiliated with the Fort Wayne Mad Ants for the upcoming year. Additionally, the NBA D-League has implemented a new flexible assignment system which will enable the 13 independent NBA teams to continue to assign players to the NBA D-League for development or rehabilitation.
For the 10th consecutive season, each singly-affiliated NBA team will have one NBA D-League team to which it may assign its players. The Fort Wayne Mad Ants, the lone independent NBA D-League Team, will be affiliated with the remaining 13 independent NBA teams. To accommodate assignments to Fort Wayne, a flexible assignment system will be utilized when an independent NBA team assigns a player at a time when the Mad Ants already have either the maximum of four NBA players on assignment or two assigned players at the position of the NBA player who is being assigned. In either event, the NBA D-League will identify to the assigning NBA team any singly-affiliated NBA D-League team that is willing to accept the assigned player, and the independent NBA team assigning the player will choose a team from among those teams to assign the player. If no singly-affiliated NBA D-League team is willing to accept the assigned player, he will be assigned to one of the non-NBA-owned single affiliate teams pursuant to a lottery.
Fort Wayne becomes Toronto’s sixth NBA D-League affiliate since 2005, joining the Arkansas RimRockers (2005-06), Colorado 14ers (2006-08) Idaho Stampede (2008-09), Erie BayHawks (2009-11) and Bakersfield Jam (2011-14). Toronto has assigned seven players to its NBA D-League affiliate since 2005 – Pape Sow, P.J. Tucker, Nathan Jawai, Solomon Alabi, Ed Davis, Quincy Acy and Dwight Buycks.