Shane Battier said NBA treats humans like numbers. Reggie Miller said Rockets are high payroll low standing. Tilman tread carefully with luxury tax and MDA wants to add the depth. Tilman and MDA will be a good fit next 4 years? Rockets are 4th highest luxury tax and 22nd winning percentage. Let's look at Luxury tax top 4 teams first. 1. Thunder - 3rd best winning % 2. GS - 3rd best winning % 3. Raptors - the best winning % 4. Rockets - 22nd winning % https://www.spotrac.com/nba/cap/ This season, Tilman spends 149 million dollars as of now, and he is trying to dump salary and MDA is trying to add the depth. Morey need 2 future picks to dump the salary for Tilman and another 2 picks to add the depth for MDA. What will be Rockets future if four future first-round draft picks are traded? If you are a NBA coach, you have to deal with whatever players you have. If you are Rockets, you are a top heavy team and you don't have depth. If you are Clippers, you are not a top heavy team but you have depth. Timing is the most deciding factor right now. MDA needs to make adjustment ASAP.
Congratulations to @BigBum Winner of the 2018 "Most Convoluted Thread" award. So many excellent candidates this year, but this one takes the cake!
Coach wants depth (after he probably pushed to overpay Ryan Anderson) just to end up playing 8 guys anyway. I hope he's going to be happy with Brendon Knight at least.
Tilman’s an idiot when it comes to basketball. Overpaid for the rockets, overpays for cp3 and capella. Was scammed by Dantoni and Morey into thinking this years team is better than last year. After this season, Tilman will have a lot less trust on analytic execs
Don't forget paying Jeff B more money to come back.. I didn't recognize the vision an owner can have. I didn't think his voice was that important out side the check book, but Les had some vision. remember he was the one who wanted MDA not Morey.
Tilman is nowhere near as liquid as Les ever was. Tilman made some money in extremely high risk businesses, and comes from a sketchy past. Les, has made a killing in business, real estate, and equity markets. He made an astronomical amount on the sale of the Rockets and sold very high. A $2.2B+ valuation will look silly in a couple of years. I am not sure how levered up Tilman is and who he borrowed from to purchase the Rockets, but he does not have Steve Balmer money where he can afford to take a $1B+ hit. He 100% bought the team for ego purposes, and had no real plan on how to turn them into a contender while also being able to cover debt going forward. His brilliant ideas are centered around integrating his restaurants into Toyota Center and the biggest difference from him and any other NBA owner is the amount of debt he had to take on to purchase the team and his reliance on the business being able to sustain itself. Every other NBA owner is either far more liquid, has significantly less debt, or has other businesses generating significantly more cash flow. Aside from Steve Balmer other owners paid $20MM-~800MM for their teams, and have had cash flows for years from those teams). Tilman thinks he can turn Toyota Center into one of his crappy restaurant businesses, but the fact is those seats are empty with a contending team, what willl they look like once they are forced to rebuild and blow it up? I think it is reasonable to expect he will eventually breach debt covenants and be forced into a sale. He's had a good 10-year run that coincides with the bull market we have had, but his business segments (restaurants and casinos) suffer the most during a downturn, and we know what happens to guys who are over-levered in a downturn. For those that are not aware of what an NBA team generates in revenue (gross sales), its nowhere near enough to justify what Tilman paid for the Rockets. There are numbers out there that show the highest net income of any team (Lakers at the time) was $150mm. Factor in new broadcasting deals, the increase in NBA viewership, less increase in player salaries, and what is the net income of the Rockets? When they rebuild and his other business tank in a downturn, he wont be able to service his debt. So why would anyone let him borrow that much? Well, I'm guessing whoever it was, wants to own the Rockets some day at a discount. TLDR: A lot joke about Tilman being broke on here, but it is highly likely he is forced to sell the Rockets by 2021, so we won't have to worry about if he is a fit for the city of Houston for too much longer. My hope is that whoever the new owner is in a few years, that he keeps the team local.
