Daryl Morey On Lin, Parsons, Bosh
Rockets GM Daryl Morey gambled and lost with Chandler Parsons, electing not to match a near-maximum three-year offer sheet from the Mavs when he could have simply brought him back for $964,750 had he exercised Houston’s team option on the small forward. He also missed out on Carmelo Anthony and Chris Bosh last week, settling for a much less glamorous agreement with Trevor Ariza. Morey took to the radio airwaves Monday in Houston to try to explain just what went wrong, and he called the structure of the Parsons offer sheet “one of the most untradeable structures that I’ve ever seen,” as we passed along earlier. Adam Wexler of CSNHouston.com and the Houston Chronicle roundup more of Morey’s remarks on SportsTalk 790 and SportsRadio 610, and we’ll hit the highlights here:
On why the team completed the Jeremy Lin trade an opened cap room:
“We had the offer to Chris, while it looked extremely likely, our deal for Jeremy [Lin] was going to go away. We had to move before we had the 100% [from Bosh], because the Lakers were ready to move on with other things.”
On the decision against matching the deal for Parsons:
“It takes three, at least, three elite players with very little exception, throughout history, it takes three elite players and a good set of players that fit around them. Once Bosh said ‘no’ it put us into another very difficult decision of, is matching Chandler Parsons, do we have a better chance of winning a title by matching it or not matching it. That comes down to a very simple question, is [James] Harden, [Dwight] Howard, Parsons a three that can be a championship three? I actually think it can be. I think Chandler is a great player, getting better. Really, really good player, no doubt. But the question is actually: is Harden, Howard, Parsons, is that three a better championship odds than Harden, Howard and the team we can put together with a guaranteed lottery pick, trade exceptions, mid-level young team improving and continuing to be flexible? That was the very tough decision before us. But I can tell you this, in our opinion it was not close. We are in a better [place] to win a championship by not matching it, once Bosh goes away than by not matching it.”
On the opportunity the team lost and what it can still accomplish:
“We felt like we were on the, right there, on having potentially having the best team in the NBA if we got Bosh and matched Parsons. We feel great about where we’re at, as well. With the youngest playoff team last year and a team that is continuing to improve with Patrick Beverley and a young core behind it and a lot of ways to continue to improve this season … We were right at the precipice of, what I would argue maybe is the best team in the NBA.”
On his expectations for the year ahead:
“We feel we were almost there with the Bosh-Parsons moves. When that didn’t happen we felt like the best thing to do was step back. We’ve now got a pick, a guaranteed lottery pick basically that is now is exactly structured like the pick that got us James Harden last time. We now have trade exceptions, we now have cap room and we also have pretty good team that’s a top four seed team in the west even with the decision not to match Chandler.”
Heat Re-Sign Mario Chalmers
MONDAY, 2:00pm: The deal is official, the Heat announced.
“It’s great to have Mario back,” team president Pat Riley said in the team’s statement. “We’re happy that he wants to continue his career in Miami, he’s one of our core players, and I believe he will have a great season.”
SUNDAY, 10:50pm: It’s a two-year, $8MM+ deal, according to ESPN.com’s Marc Stein (via Twitter).
5:11pm: The Heat will re-sign Mario Chalmers to a two-year deal, tweets Marc Stein of ESPN.com. Terms of the deal are not yet known for the Sam Goldfeder client.
LeBron James, who affectionately referred to Chalmers as “‘Rio”, is gone, but the Heat appear to be on their way to keeping the rest of their core in place. Chalmers is back on a two-year deal, Bosh will re-sign on a max deal, and Dwyane Wade and Udonis Haslem are close to new contracts in Miami.
The Heat were said to be considering sign-and-trade possibilities for Chalmers last week. The 28-year-old struggled mightily in the playoffs, averaging only 6.4 points per contest, and was benched for the team’s final postseason game. It was the first time he didn’t start for the Heat in the past three seasons, and he recorded a career-high 14.0 PER this past year during the regular season. He tied his career mark with 4.9 assists per game, and his 9.8 PPG approached his best, too.
Top 2015 Draft Prospect To Play Overseas
1:37pm: Brown has confirmed Mudiay’s decision, Goodman tweets.
1:32pm: Highly touted 2015 NBA draft prospect Emmanuel Mudiay will play professionally overseas next year rather than attend Southern Methodist University for his freshman year as planned, a source tells Jeff Goodman of ESPN.com (Twitter link). SMU coach Larry Brown has been telling people around basketball that he expects the 6’5″ point guard to leave the school, tweets Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports. Mudiay is No. 2 in Chad Ford’s ESPN.com, while Jonathan Givony of DraftExpress had him going No. 3 in his 2015 mock draft.
A source confirmed Mudiay’s plans to Adam Zagoria of SNY.tv, citing family concerns for Mudiay’s reasoning. Mudiay’s camp is concerned about an ongoing NCAA investigation at SMU, according to Goodman (Twitter links), who refutes Wojnarowski’s report that the issue stems from fear that Mudiay wouldn’t be academically eligible. The source who spoke with Zagoria also said the matter wasn’t about academics.
In any case, heading overseas would cast some degree of mystery over Mudiay’s NBA prospects. The jump from high school to professional ball overseas isn’t unprecedented for a player with a bright NBA future, and perhaps the most notorious case is that of Brandon Jennings, who played in Italy for a year rather than attend college. He was the top U.S. prospect coming out of high school in 2008, according to the Recruiting Services Consensus Index, but he wound up going 10th overall in the 2009 draft. Still, Dante Exum was the No. 5 overall pick in this year’s draft based on little more than an Australian high school career, so Mudiay’s stock won’t necessarily fall far, or at all.
Pelicans Likely To Waive Omri Casspi
The Pelicans will likely waive Omri Casspi once their trade agreement to acquire the forward from the Rockets is complete, reports Marc Stein of ESPN.com, who indicates that the swap is expected to become official on Tuesday (Twitter link). The camp for the Dan Fegan client would love to see him wind up with the Knicks, tweets David Pick of Eurobasket.com.
Casspi’s minimum salary is non-guaranteed, and it wouldn’t become fully guaranteed unless the Pelicans waited until after the August 5th to waive him, and that doesn’t appear to be an option they’re considering. It’s somewhat surprising that the Pelicans are eager to let Casspi go, since he revived a flagging career last year in Houston, averaging 6.9 points in 18.1 minutes per game. He posted a PER of just 12.9, but he was a part of the rotation for a Houston team that won 54 games. He’ll likely merit consideration for at least a fully guaranteed minimum-salary deal.
The Pelicans have been involved in a series of moves in the past few days, acquiring Alonzo Gee from the Pelicans and moving him to Houston in the trade agreement that will net the team Casspi and Omer Asik. They’re also shipping Melvin Ely to the Wizards as part of the Asik trade.
Western Notes: Blazers, Parsons, Cunningham
Agent Mark Bartelstein told Chris Haynes of CSNNW.com last week that there remained a chance that Mo Williams would re-sign with the Blazers, but the door is largely closed to that possibility, leaving a disappointed Damian Lillard, as Haynes writes.
“He’s someone who I can say will be a friend forever,” Lillard said. “We got that close in a year. He’s was the one guy I wanted back the most but that’s not in my power and I understand that. We still talk and plan to link up down the road but it’s tough to know he’s not coming back.”
Still, Lillard added that he likes Portland’s additions of Chris Kaman and Steve Blake. Here’s more from around the West:
- Rockets GM Daryl Morey called the structure of the offer sheet Chandler Parsons signed with the Mavs “one of the most untradeable structures that I’ve ever seen” in an appearance on SportsTalk 790 AM in Houston, as Tim MacMahon of ESPNDallas.com transcribes.
- The Rockets have reached out to Dante Cunningham, who’s still a long shot to re-sign with the Wolves, reports Darren Wolfson of 1500 ESPN Twin Cities (Twitter link).
- The Warriors remain in touch with Jermaine O’Neal as he ponders retirement, observes Diamond Leung of the Bay Area News Group.
- Anthony Morrow is set to join the Thunder and Brian Roberts has a deal with the Hornets, and the Pelicans went ahead Sunday and renounced their rights to both, as the RealGM transactions log shows.
The Bulls And The Salary Cap
The Bulls didn’t end up with Carmelo Anthony, but they still wound up making moves that seemingly foretell the end of Carlos Boozer‘s tenure in Chicago. Boozer remains on the roster for now, and it would seem like the Bulls, who prefer to trade him rather than use the amnesty clause to remove his $16.8MM cap hit, will continue to pursue opportunities to make a swap between now and Wednesday, the final day that teams are allowed to use the amnesty clause this year. Still, unless they’re able to trade him or make other drastic moves between now and the end of Wednesday, the Bulls won’t be able to finalize the free agent deals they reportedly have in place unless they go the amnesty route.
Chicago hasn’t officially announced any of its deals since the July moratorium ended, so the team still has $66,277,115 of guaranteed salary on its books, leaving it above the $63.065MM salary cap. That doesn’t count first-round draft pick Doug McDermott, who has a cap hold of $1,898,300 and will almost certainly sign for a salary of $2,277,960. The most powerful weapon the Bulls have as a capped-out team is the non-taxpayer’s mid-level exception, which calls for a starting salary of $5.305MM.
The Bulls have an agreement with Pau Gasol on a three-year deal for more than $22MM, and presuming that figure is accurate, his starting salary wouldn’t fit into the mid-level. The Bulls were apparently pursuing a sign-and-trade for Gasol, but the Lakers renounced his rights to accommodate their trade for Jeremy Lin, which became official Sunday. That doesn’t necessarily preclude the Lakers from signing-and-trading Gasol, but it would make it more difficult, and that’s apparently a route the Bulls and Lakers are no longer pursuing, anyway.
Nikola Mirotic has a deal with the Bulls for three years and more than $17MM, and that figure, too, would require a starting salary of more than the mid-level could provide. Chicago’s other free agent deal so far, a two-year, $5.6MM agreement with Kirk Hinrich, could be completed using Hinrich’s Early Bird rights. Instead, it’ll reportedly be for the room exception, a tool only available to under-the-cap teams. It’s not set in stone that the Bulls will use the room exception on Hinrich, but the report from TNT’s David Aldridge that they intend to do so sheds light on Chicago’s plans.
We don’t know exactly how much Gasol and Mirotic will make next season, but assuming the numbers that have been reported are correct, they’ll likely wind up with at least a combined $12MM for next season. That means the Bulls would have to remove about $17.1MM worth of salary, plus all of their non-guaranteed contracts and all of their cap holds except McDermott’s, to accommodate those deals. That $17.1MM figure is almost identical to Boozer’s salary, so it would be make the math rather simple if Chicago waived Boozer via the amnesty clause. Hinrich’s cap hold, and thus Chicago’s Early Bird rights with it, would be erased in this scenario, but the Bulls could still re-sign him using the room exception, which they evidently plan to do.
Still, Chicago appears to be at work on other fronts, including a trade that will send Greg Smith and his guaranteed salary, worth slightly more than $948K, to the Mavs for little in return. That would make up the difference between Boozer’s salary and our $17.1MM estimate for the amount of salary the Bulls have to clear for Gasol and Mirotic. The Bulls are also apparently continuing to shop Anthony Randolph, according to K.C. Johnson of the Chicago Tribune (Twitter link). Randolph, whom the Bulls acquired when they traded up to nab McDermott on draft night, has a guaranteed salary of more than $1.825MM. The salaries for Randolph and Smith come to about $2.773MM, and if the Bulls could find a way to dump Tony Snell and Mike Dunleavy without taking back any salary, either, they could knock off about $7.527MM. That still wouldn’t take them far enough under the cap to allow them to officially sign Gasol and Mirotic and avoid giving up Boozer one way or another without touching the core of Derrick Rose, Joakim Noah, Taj Gibson, and Jimmy Butler.
So, it’s a safe bet we’ll be passing along the news that Boozer is no longer a Bull sometime between now and the end of Wednesday. Chicago will surely continue to attempt to trade his salary in a deal that doesn’t bring nearly as much salary back, but with Wednesday’s amnesty deadline looming, the Bulls must negotiate against a clock as well as against other teams.
And-Ones: Rockets, Gay, Livingston, Miles
The Rockets promised Chris Bosh that they would match the Mavs’ offer sheet for Chandler Parsons if he jumped from Miami to Houston, but when Bosh agreed to re-sign with the Heat, the Rockets changed course, as Marc Stein of ESPN.com details (All Twitter links). Houston declined to match the deal for Parsons during the three-day window that expired Sunday night, and now the Rockets are poised to turn their attention back to longtime target Rajon Rondo and find a way back into the Kevin Love sweepstakes, Stein says. Here’s more from around the league after a busy weekend:
- Rudy Gay, who chose in June to opt into the final season of his contract with the Kings, said Sunday that he’s open to signing an extension but will wait to see how the team develops, as he told reporters, including Jason Jones of The Sacramento Bee. “If I was going to opt out, I was definitely going to look at my options on different teams,” Gay said. “But with me opting in, I’m not saying no extension is going to happen. I’m just trying to see where we’re going as a team and how we plan on getting better.”
- The final season of Shaun Livingston‘s three-year contract with the Warriors is worth $5,782,450 but only guaranteed for $3MM, tweets Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders. That guarantee could increase if Livingston triggers incentives, Pincus adds.
- Mutual options don’t exist in the NBA, but it appears that the last year of C.J. Miles‘ new four-year deal with the Pacers will function much like a mutual option, as Pincus details (Twitter link). Pincus indicates that his salary for that season is non-guaranteed but becomes guaranteed if he’s not waived after a certain date. Presuming he’s retained, Miles has a player option for that season, according to Pincus.
- Mark Deeks of ShamSports lists the contract guarantee date for Peyton Siva as having been July 12, so it appeared that his minimum salary contract would be fully guaranteed for the coming season when he remained on the Pistons roster through Saturday. However, Vincent Ellis of the Detroit Free Press (on Twitter) and Keith Langlois of Pistons.com both list the date as the 20th, so it appears that Siva’s contract remains non-guaranteed unless he’s not waived on or before this coming Sunday.
- The Jazz didn’t attempt to re-sign Richard Jefferson before he moved on to the Mavs, writes Tony Jones of The Salt Lake Tribune.
Hornets Send Scotty Hopson To Pelicans
The Hornets have traded Scotty Hopson to the Pelicans, both teams announced via press release late Sunday. Charlotte had just acquired Hopson from the Cavs on Saturday. The Hornets receive cash in return.
It’s perhaps only fitting that Hopson has been in two trades in as many days, since his contract was largely designed to be swapped. The Cavs signed him on the last day of March this past season for the rest of the 2013/14, and they tacked on a non-guaranteed 2014/15. Cavs GM David Griffin used the mid-level exception in an apparent attempt to make Hopson’s non-guaranteed salary larger, and thus more useful for salary matching purposes in trades. Griffin nonetheless could have signed a veteran of 10 or more seasons to the minimum salary and created an even larger non-guaranteed 2014/15 salary while spending much less in prorated guaranteed salary last season.
Hopson played all of seven minutes at the end of last season for Cleveland, and it seems doubtful he’ll add to that total for New Orleans. The 6’7″ swingman has played primarily overseas since going undrafted out of the University of Tennessee in 2011, and if he so much as makes it to training camp this fall, it’ll be a first for the one-time McDonald’s All-American.
Western Notes: Gasol, Love, Mavs, Deng
The Lakers have officially renounced the rights to Pau Gasol along with an entertaining list of long-retired players, according to Mark Deeks of ShamSports (via Twitter). Prepare for a stroll down memory lane. The Lakers renounced the rights to Horace Grant, Ron Harper, Jim Jackson, Karl Malone, Ira Newble, Theo Ratliff, Mitch Richmond, John Salley, Brian Shaw, Joe Smith, and Shammond Williams. The Lakers had to drop the rights to those players in order to help make the Jeremy Lin trade possible. For more on cap holds, check out our cap holds entry in the Hoops Rumors Glossary. More out of the West..
- The main holdup in the Kevin Love talks between the Wolves and Warriors is obviously Klay Thompson, but there’s more to it, as Tim Kawakami of the Mercury News explains. The Wolves don’t regard David Lee and Harrison Barnes as highly as Golden State does, thanks to Lee’s hefty contract and Barnes’ down season in 2013/14.
- Lakers GM Mitch Kupchak told reporters, including Bill Oram of the Orange County Register, that he wasn’t banking on landing Carmelo Anthony this summer. “We always felt like it was a longshot,” Kupchak said. “We gave it our best shot and we’re happy to accomplish what we did and we still have more work to do.”
- Lance Stephenson could prove to be this summer’s Monta Ellis for the Mavericks, tweets Jeff Caplan of NBA.com. The Mavs weren’t necessarily high on Ellis last summer but he fell to them at a great price after everyone else passed.
- The Cavaliers’ re-signing of James complicated Deng’s situation, as sign-and-trade options that could have led to a bigger payday for him were no longer available and James’ decision to sign a two-year deal set a new precedent on the market that came into play, writes Sam Amick of USA Today. The Mavericks‘ preference to go after Stephenson if they can’t land Chandler Parsons also limited Deng’s options.
Hoops Rumors Originals
A look back at the original analysis generated by the Hoops Rumors staff this week..
- Chuck Myron gave us his 2014 Amnesty Primer.
- Chuck explained the hidden value of Brendan Haywood‘s contract.
- If you missed out on this week’s chat get caught up here.