Damn. I did notice this morning that it wasn't on the league's transaction wire yet, even though the Rockets sent out the PR announcing the deal several days ago. What would the grounds for voiding be? It seems to be completely legal.
NBA voiding it because Morey consistently trying to get over. Morey is the James Harden of GM's: He knows the rules.
I could easily see the Rockets and the players association threatening legal lawsuit if the NBA tried to void it.
Under what pretense could the league veto this? Would be very unfair to both Nene and the Rockets I do love that Morey waited until September to finalize this deal. Most other team's rosters are full, so it'd be very difficult for them to copy this contract structure at this point in the offseason.
It's explained pretty clearly by Larry Coon that the CBA is not a list of things you can't do, but a list of things you can do. 106. Can teams find loopholes in the CBA and do things the league never intended to allow? As any league executive will tell you, the CBA isn't a list of the things teams can't do; it's a list of the things teams can do. The league operates in a "disallow by default" mode -- actions are not allowed except where the CBA specifically permits them. In this case, it's pretty clear Nene's market value is not $10m, yet Morey can use the stated rules to generate a rather large TPE for another team who would absolutely never be able to win 52 games this year, thus eliminating their incentive bonus exposure, and Nene doesn't come close to getting paid...money the open market would never guarantee him. The league is well within its rights to not allow this trick in their "disallow by default" position. Don't be a 'holic and say if the CBA doesn't say you can't do it, then you can. inb4 someone reads that full Coon FAQ answer and says, "Nene's loophole isn't listed" so the league can't stop it. Everyone just needs to accept the fact that a loophole doesn't have to be allowed.
If Nene is traded to a non-contender, his incentive bonuses all get wiped out, due to the 52+ Wins criteria. How does that benefit Nene? Yet, the teams both benefit rather greatly due to the loophole of Team Performance "Likely" incentives counting as salary in salary-matching. Salary that Nene will never realize...and that the open market never would have guaranteed.
i was thinking exactly the same thing morey should just go ahead and dump everything he has on silver and his blind zebras with a media leak
He benefits from getting $2+ million after previously retiring and not getting anything, all for probably not even playing more than a couple of games.
Of course it doesn't have to be allowed, the league can do whatever it wants. Of course the league can stop it. But we're not required to like it, or agree with the premise that that's how it should be. If the league's representatives couldn't think of this scenario during CBA negotiations, that's on them.
Wow, I literally could not have been more wrong on guessing the deal if I tried, but I'm pretty impressed at the Rockets chutzpah for attempting to get this kind of a deal through the league office. In general, performance-based bonuses based on specific statistical marks or games played always seemed like an incredibly strange thing to have in the CBA; it creates the perverse incentive of a cheapskate team to specifically not play a certain player if he is getting close to a bonus threshold, or even cut the player entirely. It also theoretically gives players strong incentive to hold out or threaten to not report if their bonuses became unlikely after a trade, or to demand a trade away from a poor team if their bonuses depend on team success. It would seem that the most prudent solution would be to simply amend the CBA to limit likely-to-be-achieved bonuses to the same 15% maximum that unlikely bonuses carry; at that point, the money is likely small enough that while such factors might be open to some manipulation, the overall benefit would be minimal. And to also continue, I'm pretty sad that this almost certainly means Nene must be all but done physically; I can't imagine that the Rockets willingly take the risk of having him hit any of his bonus thresholds, because then they'd be in a huge bind where they'd be forced to trade him at the deadline just to lower their tax bill. I will take Tillman at his word that he's willing to spend into the LT for upgrades, but I also understand and agree that just going into the tax for the sake of it is pretty dumb.
Nene is a fringe NBA player right now - there haven’t been any whispers of a team even offering him a minimum deal this summer. There is a non-zero chance that Morey says, “take this deal or we aren’t signing you at all”. If the NBA rescinds this deal, then Nene is SoL. It’s late in the summer and most roster spots are occupied already. (Personally, I think we’d do right by him and sign him to the minimum, since he opted out of a more lucrative deal, but by no means is this a certainty)
Like others have said: unless the NBA finds a technicality they will have a really hard time pulling “basketball reasons” from the air in order to void this contract. I’m pretty sure Morey put all his ducks in a row before crafting this masterful contract. If for some reason the league does try to void it for “basketball reasons”, when they didn’t have the nerve to do that for Kevin Durant a few years ago, that’s a big issue. This type of contract will be removed in the next CBA for sure, but we’ll see how far the league will go to try to void it (if they can).
Adam Silver is currently convening his "Dary F%$king Morey Team" to try to find some legit basis on which they can squash this deal.
