Uncle Morley has saved Tilman $10m in taxes so far this season

Morey is always a player at the trade deadline and always walks away with nothing.

Desperate times call for desperate desperateness.

 

what's the point of saving dollars when u can have a better record --- leading to better attendance at games, more playoff games, and eventual championship cash awards??????

 

Morey did this all the time under Les Alexander too. All GMs do this.

Also, unless I'm mistaken, Les never attempted to pay the luxury tax so Morey was saving Les even more money cause by going under the tax, Les was able to keep getting checks from tax teams.

 

http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/25824205/lebron-injury-nba-reporting-protocols

Windhorst on Morey....


ON OPENING NIGHT, if you were told the Houston Rockets would be starting Austin Rivers at point guard and bringing Kenneth Faried off the bench in a game in mid-January, it would've been hard to believe. It's all part of Moreyball, which doesn't mean what it used to.

Rockets GM Daryl Morey is credited with mainstreaming analytics in the NBA. While that is most certainly true, his legacy is much deeper than just pinning him as the first analytics-driven GM. He has pioneered contract maneuvers (see the Jeremy Lin poison pill contract) and style-of-play changes (the Rockets' offense of all 3-pointers and layups).

He also has mastered the art of roster arbitrage, buying and selling in volume to try to gain incremental value. This season, there already have been 20 different players used by the Rockets in games. There's going to be more, probably many more. All this and Morey has made only two in-season trades, and in both he didn't even get a player in return, as he has dumped Michael Carter-Williams and now Carmelo Anthony on the Chicago Bulls.

His constant searching for talent has helped keep the Rockets afloat this season. And it's a reminder that there are many ways for a GM to massage a team in the middle of a season than just through trade.

 

The Rockets traded away Steve Francis to get under the tax back in the days of lenient tax rules and Cuban was spending like a drunken sailor and winning a lot more than the Rockets. Not the only time he did but this stuck in my mind cause it was Steve Francis. People here just overrate how much Les actually spends.

 

Good threads... but a bunch of stupid replies.... The players he got rid of were garbage so why pay of them and the tax?

Tilman is far from cheap as seen from the contracts given to CP3 and Clint.

He knows he is going to pay the tax for the foreseeable future, so why not trim whenever there is a chance to save money.

All of this is expensive. The cost of doing business.

Yea its not my money...but anyone that doesnt lack logical reasoning...knows that this is a business at the end of the day...and money dicates almost everything about it.

If you can save..then you do that.... none of the moves have hurt us.

 

LOL if a GM's number one job is to save the owner some money you know the team is in trouble.

 

Exactly right, OP and folks in here act like MCW and Melo should have played and played a lot apparently. It's ridiculous. Those players sucked and we saved money for perhaps players who don't suck. Morey is a genius.

 

It's not wrong. 2018-2019 MLE is worth almost $8.7m as long as they stayed below the $129m tax apron threshold. It's almost the same MLE deal that PJ Tucker got when he was a FA. The Rockets were below this figure during the off-season by letting Ariza/Luc go. They could have used that money to sign a good MLE FA (which they didn't) so my calculations isn't off.

I'm counting Ennis two years because he will opt in and his $1.8m is locked in for next year. If they don't trade him his contract we will have to pay his $1.8m plus whatever luxury tax for a bench player. At this point, what would you rather have a $1.8m bench ride or a young G-leaguer minimum $600k bench rider? Every million counts especially if ownership is scraping for every luxury tax dollar. Its either run it as ONE and pay the luxury tax with Ariza or pay it next year with Ennis/no MLE player.

I am not arguing that they would have spent MORE luxury tax money on Ariza that's inevitable however when they failed to sign another "PJ Tucker" type player with their $8.7m MLE deal then it becomes almost a wash since the two scrubs they signed to replace Ariza never panned out. These moves will end up costing us (Melo already costed us $1.6m cash considerations which could have netted us a 2019 2nd round pick) this year since we will barely get into the playoffs and next year we will have the joy to watch Ennis do absolutely nothing for us again.

 

There's a lot to unpack here.

Right now we have more than $129m on our books, so even though we didn't use the non-tax payer MLE, we've spent more than we could have if we had used it anyway.

The reason I queried your point with Ennis is because we don't know what will happen next year, we might not be paying luxury tax at all, we can get under just by trading Knight which will be a lot easier next year when he's an expiring. So comparing his cost to Ariza's is irrelevant for this discussion. He's a minimum salary player.

Nothing you have said changes the fact that with Ariza our luxury tax bill would be $45m, and without it we have an $11m bill. I'm not going to even get into the idea that we will 'just' get into the playoffs or that Ariza would magically make us a 65-win team again, because that's dumb. The fact is, because we are in the luxury tax Ariza's $15m turns into a $35m contract. There was no possible way for us to stay under the luxury tax line with Ariza. A roster with Harden, Paul, Gordon, Tucker, Knight, Capela and Ariza is $132.5m. That's more than our cap now and that's 7 guys - no Rivers, no Green, no Faried, no House or Clark, no Hartenstein, Chriss or Nene. Even if we rolled with those 7, didn't sign anybody else and got charged the $800k minimum roster charge 6 times that puts us at $137m, giving us a luxury tax bill of more than double what we have now at $25m. I don't think it's 'cheap' for Tilman to decide that is simply too steep for 7 players.