With less than 20 hours left before the NBA’s trade deadline hit, I had a chance to talk to Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta on the red carpet of the Houston Sports Awards. After asking him the obligatory James Harden question, because Rockets people love waxing poetic publicly about their star, I asked Fertitta what I cared about: Would he be ok with Daryl Morey adding to his luxury tax bill by adding payroll at the deadline?
“As long as one of the next three we’re not over (the luxury tax) I don’t care,” Fertitta told me. “We have a chance to win a championship this year, if they want to go $10 million over I don’t really care.”
But what the Rockets owner said next turned out to be more enlightening.
“We also look at the ability to get us lower so if there’s another opportunity we have something to do also.”
Less than 30 minutes later ESPN reported the Rockets had a deal in place to shed payroll by acquiring Iman Shumpert, Nik Stauskas, and Wade Baldwin in a 3-way trade for Brandon Knight and Marquese Chriss. Then hours before the 2:00 deadline, the Rockets flipped Stauskas and Baldwin to Indiana after sending James Ennis to Philadelphia, taking back no salary in return. Not only did the Rockets cut payroll, they found a way to get under the tax altogether.
“We were also able to create a lot of flexibility for both buyouts this year, to add players down the stretch this year, and also into the future as well,” Morey said February 8, the day after the deadline. “It’s gonna make it a lot easier for us to add players down the road as well.”
After declining to use most of their $5.3 million taxpayer mid-level exception over the summer, the Rockets were well setup for the buyout market, but have so far missed on their top targets. While they have two weeks to make something happen in that department, it seems increasingly unlikely the team will add anyone else of significance which takes me back to the first part of Fertitta’s answer to my payroll question: “As long as one of the next three we’re not over (the luxury tax) I don’t care.”
cbafaq.com While I’m sure Fertitta would love to be under the tax every year, it isn’t as dire the next couple of seasons now that the Rockets should stay below this season after finishing below last season, and maybe that was the goal all along.
Nobody has pushed the Warriors like the Rockets did last May since Kevin Durant since Kevin Durant joined their team, but Golden State still outscored Houston by 73 points in that series despite losing three games. Just for context, the Rockets won their first two series of last year’s playoffs in five games, outscoring Minnesota by 44 points and Utah by 50. Despite the confidence exuded from Morey in the fall, the Rockets got worse over the summer and that became even more obvious once the season started. It doesn’t help that the Warriors appear to be better thanks to the addition of DeMarcus Cousins, so although the Rockets, as Fertitta said before the deadline, have a chance to win the championship, that chance is very, very slim, but thanks to free agency, that could change a year from now.
Even if the Rockets bring back this exact team next season the chances of it winning a championship could balloon. The working assumption around the NBA is the Kevin Durant is headed to New York, and though the Warriors could have a little bit of space under the salary cap with which to work if that happened, it wouldn’t be enough to adequately replace one of the NBA’s best players. If the Warriors come back down to the rest of the West pack, the conference could be as wide open as it has ever been.
The Rockets are currently over the cap next season, but with all five starters under contract and bird rights on free agent to-be Shumpert they’ll have some room to maneuver. Because they erased Knight’s bloated salary off their books, the team will have the full mid-level exception to work with, which is what they used to sign P.J. Tucker two summers ago, so you can find a significant contributor that way. The Rockets also have nine small trade exceptions, and while they can’t be stacked on top of one another, the players acquired for them can, and assuming it makes the playoffs this season, Houston will own all of its first round picks from 2020 on.
When Chris Paul is 33 and James Harden is playing at an MVP level, punting on a season is hardly the best plan, and the Rockets would balk at the notion that’s what they’ve done, but when you look at the moves they’ve made since the buzzer sounded on the Western Conference Finals May 28 it’s hard to see it another way. The thing, with the uncertainty surrounding the future of the league’s best team, it could very well be the right way to go.