When Jason Collins came out of the closet in a Sports Illustrated column during last spring’s playoffs, the veteran center had a good five months before the 2013-14 NBA training camp to find his next team. Collins is an active NBA player, the first openly gay player in the four major North American professional sports to come out, and he was adamant that his career would not be ending with that scene-shifting announcement.

Three months into that journey, though, Collins is still without a team – and this is either typical of someone of Collins’ stature as a role player on the end of the bench, a sign of the NBA’s league-wide fiscal belt tightening, or a worrying note for those that hoped that an openly gay athlete could sign with a pro team with relatively little hoopla to follow. Wednesday marked the one-year anniversary of Collins’ 2012 free agent signing with the Boston Celtics, and every day that follows will unfortunately force us NBA observers to ask a question that we want nothing to do with: are NBA teams passing on signing Jason Collins the basketball player, or Jason Collins the openly gay athlete?

Collins, one of the headier NBA players in recent memory, is more than ready for both sides of this particular string out. There are the players that you sign as soon as free agency hits in early July, there are the second tiered guys that you sign after that, and then there are the players like Jason Collins that usually have to pick up the scraps following that second or even tertiary rush.

Then there is the groundbreaking part where an openly gay NBA player with openly rock solid NBA credentials attempts to find NBA employment on the open market.

In July, a week into the free agent courting period, Collins discussed as much with the New York Times’ Howard Beck:

“I look at it, honestly, like any other free agency in the past several years, where I know I have to stay patient,” said the 34-year-old Collins, who played in only 38 games last season, averaging 10 minutes a game as a defensive-minded center for Boston and later Washington. “And I know that at this point in my career, you remain hopeful that there’s a job and an opportunity waiting for you once teams start to fill out their rosters.”

As we mentioned above, the Boston Celtics signed Collins to a free agent deal around this time last summer. Prior to that season, the Atlanta Hawks signed him just a few days after the free agency period opened up following the 2011 lockout, but in 2010 Jason had to wait until early September to find a deal with a Hawks team that badly needed his services in defending division rival Dwight Howard, and his Orlando Magic.

That was three years ago, an NBA eternity for a player that hasn’t played more than a thousand minutes in a season since 2007-08, and one that was traded against the wishes of the Boston Celtics’ best player last year mainly because the Celtics just wanted to take a chance on a limited chucker in Jordan Crawford.

Boston’s best player last February, Kevin Garnett, is now a member of the Brooklyn Nets, a franchise that employed Collins from 2001-08, featuring a coach in Jason Kidd that made it to the NBA Finals as a player with Collins in the pivot in 2002 and 2003. That team would seem to be the perfect fit for someone like Collins, as a spot player to perhaps battle Roy Hibbert or Joakim Noah off the bench in the playoffs, but the recent signing of swingman Alan Anderson rounded off the team’s roster at 15 spots. And on top of that, Anderson’s relatively modest starting salary of under $1 million a year will cost the Nets over $4 million in luxury tax penalties.

The financial aspect of any end of the bench signing cannot be overlooked in the post-lockout era. Not every team is dealing with the same punitive tax issues that the Nets are, but with so many teams rubbing up against the luxury tax threshold, adding a player like Collins for the veteran’s minimum could cost teams both tax penalties and the revenue sharing benefits that come from working under the tax line. For quite a few teams, even a one year deal could hamstring a club’s ability to take on extra salary in a trade sometime midseason.

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