Houston Rockets Rumors | Hoops Rumors

Southwest Notes: Curry, Fredette, McDaniels

July 24th, 2015 at 8:59am CST by Chuck Myron

The competition in the Western Conference is fierce, and Rockets GM Daryl Morey acknowledges that even in the wake of the Ty Lawson trade, his team isn’t the favorite, as Jonathan Feigen of the Houston Chronicle relays. Still, the Rockets made a key step forward, as Feigen examines.

“People always used to say our point guard position was terrible, the worst, whatever,” Morey said. “I always pointed out that Pat Beverley was a really good player. He’s just maybe suffering compared to all these perennial All-Stars we go against in the West. Obviously, we’re still going to be going against those very difficult All-Stars, but Ty Lawson is somebody who gives you a top-10 point guard in the league, somebody who can really help us.”

Here’s more from the Southwest Division:

The Pelicans only made a “token offer” to Seth Curry that included a partial guarantee, league sources tell Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports (Twitter link). A previous report indicated that they were close to a deal with him for a guaranteed contract. Curry signed a two-year, fully guaranteed contract with the Kings.
New Orleans didn’t want to re-sign Jimmer Fredette, Wojnarowski says in the same tweet. The ex-Pelicans guard signed with the Spurs instead. Still, Fredette faces a challenge to find his niche in San Antonio, where he’ll have to prove he’s capable of replacing Marco Belinelli‘s shooting and beat out Kyle Anderson and Jonathon Simmons for minutes, as Jay Yeomans of the Deseret News examines.
The three-year contract that K.J. McDaniels signed with the Rockets includes a team option on the final season and starts at $3.19MM, tweets Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders. That first-year salary figure means Houston is essentially prevented from using any more of its mid-level exception without triggering an $88.74MM hard cap.
Maurice Ndour‘s contract with the Mavericks is for three years, with this season’s salary and half of next season’s guaranteed, league sources tell Ian Begley of ESPNNewYork.com (Twitter link).
Nikola Milutinov, this year’s No. 26 overall pick, is negotiating with Olympiacos of Greece, sources tell Sportando’s Emiliano Carchia. The Spurs draftee had reportedly been close to a deal with Panathinaikos, another Greek team, but Panathinaikos landed Miroslav Raduljica instead. Regardless, the Spurs won’t sign him this season.

Rockets Sign Sam Dekker

July 22nd, 2015 at 10:33pm CST by Eddie Scarito

Courtesy of USA Today Sports Images

The Rockets have signed first round pick Sam Dekker to a rookie scale deal, Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders reports (Twitter link). Dekker was the No. 18 overall selection in this year’s NBA Draft. The addition of the forward will raise Houston’s current roster count to 11, all of which are fully guaranteed, though that number doesn’t include Marcus Thornton, whose deal has yet to be made official.

Dekker will earn more than $1.646MM this coming season in the first year of a four-year deal, presuming he receives the standard 120% of the rookie scale, which is most likely the case. The forward will likely take home $1,720,560 in 2016/17, $1,794,600 in 2017/18, and $2,760,095 in the contract’s final season.

In three seasons at Wisconsin, Dekker posted averages of 12.1 points, 5.0 rebounds, and 1.3 assists. His career shooting line was .493/.348/.695.

Western Notes: Hammon, Terry, Teletovic, Jazz

July 22nd, 2015 at 8:59am CST by Chuck Myron

Former Nets executive Bobby Marks says he would call Spurs assistant Becky Hammon first if he were running a team and looking for a head coach (Twitter link). Hammon has been a full-time NBA assistant for only one season, but she guided the Spurs to the Las Vegas Summer League title as the first female summer league head coach and commanded the attention of her players, as Sean Deveney of The Sporting News details.

“She’s just a good coach,” said Kyle Anderson, San Antonio’s 2014 first-round pick. “Everybody listens to her like they would anyone else. I mean, she’s the coach.”

The arrival of the first female head coach for regular season play still seems a long way off, but, as Dan McCarney of the San Antonio Express-News points out, the Spurs have once more proven they’re not afraid of innovation. Here’s more from around the Western Conference:

Jason Terry confirmed Monday that he’s close to a deal with the Rockets, but Houston has renounced his Bird rights, according to the RealGM transactions log. That means the team is limited to paying him a deal with a starting salary of no more than the roughly $2MM slice of the mid-level exception left over from the K.J. McDaniels signing, which also took up a portion of the mid-level.
Upheaval has surrounded the Suns during GM Ryan McDonough‘s first two seasons on the job, but this week he signaled that he’s settled on his main players, as Paul Coro of the Arizona Republic documents. “It took a little while to get to a core we liked but we think we finally have that and have the ability to be successful this year and then hopefully build on that and add to it a year from now when the cap spikes up and we have cap space to bring in guys that help our young core,” McDonough said.
The Suns signed Mirza Teletovic for only one year, but they hope to re-sign him to a new deal next summer, Coro writes in the same piece.
The Jazz‘s three-year deal with Tibor Pleiss is worth an even $9MM, and the team’s three-year deal with Raul Neto is worth precisely $2,852,546, reports Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders (Twitter link).

And-Ones: Labor Negotiations, NBPA, Lawson

July 21st, 2015 at 10:39pm CST by Eddie Scarito

Many agents don’t see reason for the union to opt out of the collective bargaining agreement in 2017, in part because of the influx of billions of dollars in new revenue and in part because the league would try to negotiate a deal worse for players than the one they’d be opting out of, Bleacher Report’s Howard Beck details. Some sources indicate to Beck that as many as a dozen teams are losing money. Both the owners and the union have the right to opt out of the agreement, but an increasing number of people on both sides believe a pitched battle over labor issues won’t take place, Beck hears. The league projects that the average salary by 2016/17 will be $7.5MM, a 44% increase from 2010/11, Beck writes in the same story.

Here’s more from around the league:

The National Basketball Players Association is studying ways to use the $57,298,826 shortfall coming their way from the owners as a result of the failure of 2014/15 salaries to add up to the required percentage of basketball related income, reports Ken Berger of CBSSports.com. The union will discuss using part of it to fund health care costs for retired players and decide how to divvy up the rest among active players, as Berger details.
The union will distribute among affected players a $5.3MM settlement in a lawsuit against the state of Tennessee over its “jock tax” that requires players on visiting teams going against the Grizzlies to fork over sums to the state, Berger adds in the same piece. The tax, which ends after this season, had perhaps its most profound effect on players who signed 10-day contracts, and the Tennessee legislature used data from our 10-Day Contract Tracker as it considered the tax’s eventual repeal.
Nuggets team president Josh Kroenke discussed Ty Lawson in the wake of the point guard being dealt to the Rockets, Marc J. Spears of Yahoo! Sports relays. “We did our best to try to help Ty. I’m excited to see he is embracing the first step of the process to get better,” Kroenke said. “I hope this is a good thing for Ty the person. There is no guarantees. Sometimes you need to hear it from a different person. With Jameer Nelson and Emmanuel Mudiay we’re excited about the future. We’re excited to turn the page and move on even if the [trade] value wasn’t equal,” Kroenke continued. “There wasn’t a lot of teams [interested]. Houston was in a position where it could put them over the top. We’re fully aware of that.“
The two guaranteed years in No. 33 pick Jordan Mickey‘s four-year, $5MM contract with the Celtics are worth a combined $2.4MM, reports Steve Bulpett of the Boston Herald.

Chuck Myron contributed to this post.

Southwest Notes: Lawson, McCallum, Pelicans

July 21st, 2015 at 9:58pm CST by Eddie Scarito

Rockets GM Daryl Morey isn’t shy about gambling, and he acknowledges that trading four players for troubled point guard Ty Lawson carries with it some potential pitfalls, Calvin Watkins of ESPN.com writes. “I think when you’re trying to get the best team out of 30, you got to take risk all over the place,” Morey said. “Again, it’s a playing risk, injury risk, character risk. We feel Ty is someone we wanted to add to our team.”

With Houston badly in need of a playmaker at the point, Morey believes he has filled that need with Lawson, Watkins notes. “He’s one of the best playmakers in the league,” Morey continued. “If you look at the leaderboard for assists in the last few years or since he’s been in the league, he’s near the top. I think, as we saw, especially when [Harden] played a couple of teams last year, we struggle against teams that really load on James Harden, and we feel Ty will be a lot more difficult for teams to do that.”

Here’s more out of the Southwest Division:

Recent Spurs trade acquisition Ray McCallum‘s minimum salary of $947,276 became fully guaranteed when San Antonio didn’t waive him by the end of Monday, as Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders notes (Twitter link). It had been partially guaranteed for $200K, as the schedule of salary guarantee dates shows.
The Pelicans are looking into establishing their own D-League franchise, John Reid of The Times Picayune writes. New Orleans GM Dell Demps acknowledged the franchise’s interest in the D-League, but he didn’t know the exact time frame for the process, Reid adds. ”A couple of years ago, we did not do it because our players were so young and growing and we figured we just throw them into the fire,” Demps said. ”But that is the next step for us. We’re looking at some options right now on the Gulf Coast and in the state of Louisiana. So we’re looking into that. We have some plans to add our own D-League team.”
Danny Green surprised some when he elected to re-sign with the Spurs with a four-year, $45MM deal when numerous teams had expressed interest in his services, and he likely could have earned more elsewhere. But Green believes his annual salary is in line with his production, Dan McCarney of The San Antonio Express-News notes (Twitter links). “People keep saying that I took less. I think I took what I was worth,” said Green. Though, to get his full market value, Green would have likely had to go to a team like the Pistons or the Kings, who certainly don’t offer as good a chance to contend as San Antonio does, McCarney adds. The Pistons, Mavericks, Blazers, Knicks and the Kings, who’d reportedly made Green their top target, all had some degree of interest in the swingman.

Chuck Myron contributed to this post.

Rockets Re-Sign K.J. McDaniels

July 21st, 2015 at 3:52pm CST by Arthur Hill

TUESDAY, 3:52pm: The deal is official, the team announced.

SUNDAY, 1:41pm: Restricted free agent K.J. McDaniels has agreed to a three-year, $10MM deal to stay with the Rockets, tweets Jake Pavorsky of Liberty Ballers. The deal does not include a player option, according to Mark Berman of Fox 26 Houston (Twitter link).

The Rockets used a portion of their mid-level exception to sign McDaniels, who claimed to have received a “strong offer” from another organization. Houston lost unrestricted free agent Josh Smith to the Clippers on Thursday. “But I’m too happy and too blessed and thankful to be back apart of #RedNation,” McDaniels tweeted after the agreement was reached.

“It’s a blessing and I’m happy to be a part of the Rockets franchise. I’m excited to see what happens,” McDaniels told Berman (Twitter link). “It means a lot. It just shows how much the coaches enjoy working with me, how much I enjoy working with them.” (Twitter link).

McDaniels was traded from the Sixers to the Rockets at the February deadline in exchange for Isaiah Canaan and a second-round pick. He barely played in Houston, appearing in just 10 games before suffering a non-displaced fracture in his right elbow in the season’s final regular-season game. McDaniels averaged 9.2 points and 3.8 points in 52 games with Philadelphia before the trade.

Hoops Rumors Community Shootaround 7/20/15

July 20th, 2015 at 11:59pm CST by Chuck Myron

Rockets GM Daryl Morey is no stranger to risks and splashy moves, and Houston’s trade for Ty Lawson represents both. Lawson was arrested last week on suspicion of DUI, his second such arrest in six months. Still, he’s finished third in the NBA in assists per game each of the past two seasons, an accomplishment that comes amid the league’s golden age of point guards. Lawson will make more than $12.404MM this season, but coupled with Patrick Beverley‘s affordable new four-year deal for about $23MM total, Houston gained depth at a key position for a reasonable price.

It’s all part of an effort to win the franchise’s first championship in more than two decades, which prompts the question of the day: Are the Rockets legitimate title contenders now?

It wouldn’t be altogether difficult to support the argument that they were in the championship mix even before the Lawson deal, since they had the second seed in the Western Conference entering the playoffs last season and made it to the conference finals. However, the rest of the Western elite improved this summer. The Spurs landed LaMarcus Aldridge and David West. The Clippers snatched DeAndre Jordan back from the Mavs, signed Paul Pierce and lured Josh Smith away from the Rockets. The Thunder are poised to return to contention with a healthy Kevin Durant and a full season of Enes Kanter. The Warriors kept most of their 67-win championship team together. LeBron James and the Cavs loom even if Houston can escape the West.

Take to the comments section below with your thoughts and opinions. We look forward to what you have to say.

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Ty Lawson Gives Up Guarantee On 2016/17 Salary

July 20th, 2015 at 4:47pm CST by Will Joseph

As part of his trade to the Rockets, Ty Lawson has agreed to make the final season of his contract non-guaranteed, sources tell Grantland’s Zach Lowe (Twitter link). It’s quite a forfeit for Lawson because he had been fully guaranteed $13,213,482 for the 2016/17 season. Lawson’s new guarantee date is the day following the NBA Finals, or the day after the draft — whichever one is later — Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders tweets.

The non-guaranteed season gives the Rockets some peace of mind with the troubled point guard. Lawson entered a 30-day residential treatment program on Saturday. His latest DUI-related arrest came Tuesday morning in Los Angeles. It was the former Nuggets guard’s second such arrest in six months.

Lawson is due to make more than $12.404MM this season. As Lowe suggests (via Twitter), Lawson likely expects to be able to reel in more money with the salary cap’s expected rise next season.

Nuggets Waive Pablo Prigioni

July 20th, 2015 at 4:26pm CST by Eddie Scarito

JULY 20TH, 4:26pm: The Nuggets have waived Prigioni, ESPN.com’s Marc Stein tweets. Denver confirmed the move in its press release on the Lawson trade.

JULY 19TH, 9:13pm: The Nuggets intend to waive newly acquired point guard Pablo Prigioni, TNT’s David Aldridge reports (Twitter link). Prigioni is being sent to Denver as part of the Ty Lawson deal. The Nuggets appear to be committing to turning the team over to 2015 first-rounder Emmanuel Mudiay with today’s moves.

Prigioni’s salary of $1,734,572 is set to become fully guaranteed if he remains on the roster past Monday, as is shown by our schedule of contract guarantee dates. Denver would only be on the hook for $440K, the amount of Prigioni’s partial guarantee, by waiving him.

What’s next for the 38-year-old from Argentina is unclear. He’ll likely draw offers from overseas, and the Cavaliers, who were reportedly trying to acquire Prigioni at last season’s trade deadline, could potentially look to him as an alternative to Matthew Dellavedova, who is still unsigned, though that is merely my speculation.

In three NBA seasons Prigioni has averaged 3.8 points, 1.9 rebounds, and 3.0 assists to go with a slash line of .437/.398/.872.

Rockets Acquire Ty Lawson

July 20th, 2015 at 4:25pm CST by Chuck Myron

Courtesy of USA Today Sports Images

JULY 20TH, 4:25pm: The Nuggets have waived Prigioni, and the deal is official, Denver announced in a press release. In a condition of the trade, Lawson has agreed to make the 2016/17 season, the final year of his contract, non-guaranteed, sources tell Grantland’s Zach Lowe (Twitter link). As part of the deal, the Nuggets receive cash considerations, Mark Berman of Fox 26 Houston tweets. The press release from the Rockets notes that it’s their own lottery-protected 2016 pick going to Denver.

SUNDAY, 8:16pm: The Rockets have reached a deal with the Nuggets that will send Ty Lawson to Houston, reports Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports (Twitter link). Marc Stein of ESPN.com had tweeted just moments earlier that the sides were deep in talks. Kostas Papanikolaou, Pablo Prigioni, Joey Dorsey, Nick Johnson and a protected 2016 first-round pick go to Denver, Wojnarowski adds (All Twitter links). Houston will receive a 2017 second-round pick in addition to Lawson, as Wojnarowski also reports (on Twitter). The first-rounder going to Denver is lottery-protected, and the second-rounder headed to Houston is unprotected, tweets Jonathan Feigen of the Houston Chronicle. The move, when it becomes official, will bring an end to Lawson’s tenure with the Nuggets even though GM Tim Connelly and coach Michael Malone both expressed their support for the troubled point guard in recent days.

Chris Mannix of SI.com last week identified the Rockets as a team with interest in the point guard even in the wake of his latest DUI-related arrest, which came Tuesday morning in Los Angeles. It was his second such arrest in six months. Lawson entered a 30-day residential treatment program on Saturday.

Houston made more sense as a Lawson suitor than the Pistons or the Lakers, the two other teams Mannix identified in his report from last week, since both Detroit and L.A. made major investments in point guards this summer. The Pistons agreed to re-sign Reggie Jackson for $80MM and the Lakers drafted D’Angelo Russell No. 2 overall. The Lakers indeed made a determined push, but the Nuggets preferred what Houston offered, Stein reports (on Twitter). Rockets re-signed Patrick Beverley, but only for $23MM over four years. Beverley and Lawson now figure to compete for minutes.

The Kings and Nuggets reportedly spoke about Lawson prior to the draft, but Sacramento apparently wasn’t willing to give up the No. 6 pick in exchange for him in large measure because of the 27-year-old’s off-court issues. By contrast, Lawson’s talent appears to have convinced Houston it’s worth taking a shot on him, as he’s coming off a career-high 9.6 assists per game.

The trade nonetheless carries financial consequences for the Rockets. Lawson’s contract calls for him make more than $12.404MM this season and in excess of $13.213MM in 2016/17, and the exchange as reported so far will push Houston over the $84.74MM luxury tax threshold by about $500K, according to former Nets executive Bobby Marks (Twitter link). The Rockets have until the end of the regular season to go under that line and avoid paying the tax. Houston faces a hard cap of $4MM above the tax line if it signs No. 32 pick Montrezl Harrell to a contract that covers more than two seasons at the minimum salary, as Marks also points out (on Twitter). The swap also means the Rockets aren’t in line to open cap space next summer, Marks adds (Twitter link).

The Nuggets meanwhile go under the cap with the deal and are set to open an estimated $46MM in cap space next summer, Marks tweets. Papanikolaou’s salary of nearly $4.798MM for this coming season is non-guaranteed, and Prigioni’s salary of almost $1.735MM carries only a $440K partial guarantee. Dorsey’s pay of about $1.015MM and Johnson’s approximately $845K salary are fully guaranteed, but they don’t make much of a dent in the Nuggets payroll.

The most significant on-court effect for Denver is that No. 7 overall pick Emmanuel Mudiay, also a point guard, has a clear shot to lead the team. The Nuggets re-signed Jameer Nelson, who seems to have a decent shot to begin the coming season as a starter, but Mudiay is clearly the team’s future at the position, and Malone had no shortage of enthusiasm about his play during summer league, tweets Marc J. Spears of Yahoo! Sports.

Did the Nuggets get a fair return for Lawson, considering the circumstances? Leave a comment to have your say.