no they weren't JaMychal Green wasn't. he's making less than mle money Jerami Grant was acquired for a 1st round pick. oh wait, the rockets don't have there's Garret Temple signed for less than mle
And to add to your point, the Rockets have completely stopped adding real rotation players since Tilman took over. This off season wasn't a one off. The Rockets have punted the off-season both years since he bought the team.
the mle was a cap constraint because it’s all we had to offer. if those player took less than the mle to play else where I don’t think we can blame morey or Tillman the players just made a choice and we were not it. If we didn’t have the cap constraints then we would of had more money to offer and if we then chose not to use it I think we could then point fingers
And didn’t we give most of our mle to House leaving us with only 2million which definitely would have taken us out of the running for any of those players on that list
That would mean possibly having to pay Ariza salary for half the year. No way Oh wait, billionaire owner who is a number guy couldn't figure out how we were not paying luxury tax. MOREY FAULT, according to owner
Imagine this team if we faced Warriors without Looney,KD, and Klay like Raptors did Just bad luck bro. At Least we don't have John walls horrible contact
When you have LTS it takes you out of the running of mostly any quality role player. There’s a reason why you see a list of partial guarantee contacts here. Then rockets fans get all upset bc these fringe players don’t perform to the level of a quality player. The rockets are extremely lucky rivers did them a favor this offseason.
Imagine finding an owner who will not give away draft picks to get rid of vet minimum contracts to stay under the LT?
Spoiler Know what they're missing? Cheap young talent. (Getting Mike to actually play them is an entirely different thing.) Go look at Memphis. Caboclo (was on the Vipers) Brooks (drafted him & traded him to Memphis) Melton (traded in the Anderson trade) Instead, these washed up never has been scrubs. Of course people will blame Tilman for no picks even though Morey has traded picks long before Tilman arrived. We Need Quality Rookie Contracts Spoiler Spoiler
Having Ryan Anderson's $20M salary on our books NOW would give us rouhgly... um... $20M to sign someone with at the trade deadline. Think that might have helped? Having Patrick Patterson and/or a re-signed Shumpert on the roster could have netted us some solid bench strength at the deadline. Those are things that were possible if we had an owner not terrified of the luxury tax. Instead, the only thing Morey was allowed to do to create cap space was get inventive with a Nene contract that *might* have gotten some wiggle room, but posed no financial threat to Tilman. That's some weaksauce right there.
I agree with your overall point …. BUT - How many of those guys you listed got full NT-MLE ? How many got the T-MLE ? We used a good chunk of the mini MLE on House so unless you used the NT version , there's not a lot of money there. That's all we had to work with is the MLE and vet min's. The real problem was not using the MLE last year …. and throwing away draft picks and contractual assets to get under the tax further handcuffing your ability to take salary back via trade.
I wish we had Balmer as the owner... why couldn't dumb Les sell the team to someone with more money..
True. Plus no one has mentioned yet the additional 8mill player that could’ve been added to the Westbrook trade. Every single move has been predicated on avoiding the luxury tax. We give away picks every year to dump salary
Wait till the Harden era is over. That's when the real pain will begin with this cheap ass incompetent dumbass of an owner. Sacramento Kings of Texas. For now Harden is the Superman for the Rockets. He is the hope. And that's about it.