How the Rockets can get Chris Paul AND another star

I think the pitch to Chris Paul and what has him interested is the LeBron James play in 2018. If Chris signed and the long term contracts of Gordon, Beverly, and Anderson were what we traded away to free up the space rather than Ariza or Lou's expiring deals than Paul Millsap isn't the target.

 

I think the other factor we should consider in this is maybe CP3 will come here for less than the $34.7M if Morey can present him with a plan to build a team that can compete with GS. If CP3 truly wants to win, he has to know hamstringing a team with a his max contract and forcing us to give up our bench would be counterproductive to winning a championship.

We have seen other players sacrifice money, role and ego to win. For DM to build a team that can beat GS, we're going to need some great GMing and some players willing to do those three things.

These next two weeks should be very interesting. There are some very talented players in play, which ones we get may come down to who wants to win and how compelling DM is with painting the picture of our journey to the championship.

 

The three bolded lines are what I've been saying.

The Warriors aren't just a collection of great players. They are a collection of great players that FIT.

Cleveland is a collection of great players that do not fit that well. They can blow by the weak East. They can win a championship once in a while if everything lines up right. But they can't dominate. (Did I say they had LeBron James?) If you look at LeBron's championship teams, Bosh was rendered a glorified role player. So is Love. Wade was sort of a secondary alpha who can be counted on to dominate about a third of the time. Same is Irving now. And he had a bunch of pretty good over-the-hill former stars as supporting cast both in Miami and in Cleveland.

For the Rockets to beat the Warriors in the next 2 or 3 years, we have to have a collection of great players that FIT, unless that collection includes LeBron. A team like that takes time to assemble. Getting a Paul George who is going to jump ship after a year, and getting an aging Chris Paul is not going to achieve that.

I don't think getting star players is PR stuff for Morey. It may be for Les, but not Morey. Morey wants to win. His hands are tied by his boss. But Morey does believe in star power. Fitting and stability is not his top priority. Talent is. I understand that you have to have talent before talking about fit and stability. So in that sense, I don't blame Morey. But we've been seeing that star search machine running for about a decade now. We are still miles away from contending.

 

Les has obviously hired McHale for the PR job and Morey has to run some too as MDA isn't a very good PR dude himself..

 

We shouldn't trade all the players we have mentioned if no star is coming here.

 

This was simultaneously the most infuriating and the most hilarious moment of the playoffs. The meltdown was consummated here.

 

If the Rockets cleared enough cap space to sign a Tier 1/2/3 max free agent, they'd lose access to both the Bi-Annual Exception (BAE: $3.29M for 2017-18) and Non-Taxpayer Mid-Level Salary Exception (N-T MLE: $8.406M for 2017-18); however, they would be able to use the Room Mid-Level Salary Exception (Room MLE: $4.328M for 2017-18).

 

I made a comment yesterday about how the Wolves could really use a stretch 4 like Ryno to provide spacing for a Wiggins, Butler, KAT, and Rubio starting lineup.

Ryno is a negative asset on that contract, so what do y'all think about attaching Bev to him in a salary dump trade to the Wolves in order to entice them to take Ryno? The Wolves could definitely use both of these guys, and we'd pretty much be at the amount of cap space needed to offer CP3 the max. Bev isn't really needed if we get a commitment from Paul, and it's clear that he wouldn't mind getting traded.

Then Morey can look for a starting PF. The best he could probably do is a S&T with the Hawks for Millsap.

CP3
Harden
Ariza
Millsap
Capela

Morey should obviously still try and get Paul George before going after Millsap tho

 

In More-Ly we Trust....
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getting rid of anderson is difficult enough, but getting rid of anderson and williams w/o taking salary back is almost impossible unless some other team has a TPE.

 

If we somehow got CP3 and Blake...man..we would really need to hit home runs on their back ups b/c those 2 are almost guaranteed to miss like 20 games a season. Thank god Harden is extremely durable.

 

SO YOU'RE SAYING THERE'S A CHANCE

 

Thanks. I guess I can admit - - you know more than I do about the old cap and the new cap and the baseball cap, too, probably...

 

You're overestimating the difficulty here. Gordon, Lou (or Ariza), Bev, and Harell or Dekker is basically the same salary as Anderson and Lou. Or Gordon, Ariza, and Lou is the same as Anderson/Lou.

Either one of those sets of players going out should generate at least two future first round draft picks. Gordon is for sure worth a future first. As is Bev. And between Ariza and Lou there should be another first round pick generated plus a second. And for sure if you added Dekker into the Ariza/Lou package you could pull another first.

So you could get the cap space in that manner with at least two and possibly three future first round picks coming back your way.

So you sign Paul, add the picks to Anderson and Bev sand there's you a package for George.......and somebody else.....since Anderson and Bev could net you George plus an additional salary or salaries of around $14.1 million.

So, if CP3, did agree to come here, we could go back to Indy and ask them to take Anderson plus three or four future first rounders. Lakers can't top that deal. Wonder if the Spurs could? Wonder if Boston would?

Nevertheless, the first shoe to drop is Chris Paul? I'm pretty sure that Paul and George are somewhat teamed up. If Paul decides Houston, that will influence George's desire time cine here and could help us acquire him by us being willing to put a few more assets on the table. Same thing with the Spurs. If Paul commits there, then they might have the advantage of offering more assets for George than we would be willing to offer Indy without George making a commitment here.

And then here's another factor. IF the Clippers see that they are gonna lose Paul, then they could possibly open themselves up for a sign-and-trade that would allow us to peddle Anderson/Lou/Taylor plus a pick fit a signed-and-traded Paul, which suits then leave us with a lot of assets, salary, and options to pursue George or another star or possibly (possibly) George AND another star.

Remember I said several years ago when the Heat were running that really to win in the future you were going to need 4 superstar level players. That's where we're at. Guys. we're not just looking at getting Paul and George. We're also trying to get a fourth guy.

 

Short-sighted? Undermining our off-season chances this year? Aren't you assuming 55 wins was doable without our signings last year, or underestimating the importance of our 3rd best record in attracted top FAs?

The way I look at it is our chances this year to attract someone like CP3 were increased immeasurably by giving D'Antoni a fighter's chance to prove his system could work once again, that he wasn't washed up....that his system of pace and space is still solid. I believe our regular season success re-validated MDA, and we are being mentioned as serious contenders for top free agents because they want to be part of an MDA offense with Harden.

Now, compare that to keeping Dwight or going the Hinkie route....and floating around 41 wins again or tanking. Ryno might be a bad contract, because he's a highly questionable NBA starter, but Morey did give MDA weapons to get us to the FA table this summer ... FAs like wins.

 

i still don't understand why chris paul would choose HOU over SAS, the team that just beat our butts by 40 @ the toycen. i mean if he's chasing a ring they have a proven track record with a system/methodology/coaching/etc that we simply can't match. plus we crumbled and choked like few have ever witnessed. am i missing something here?

 

Hell yes! We're getting CP3, George AND Cousins guys! Championships for years bro's!

It's actually financially possible, just extremely, extremely unlikely.

 

Nope. But you never know...maybe he doesn't like that much Pop...or LMA...or Kawhi (sounds ridiculous i know, but still). Or maybe he just likes more MDA...or Harden...or Morey...or Houston...i mean, we really don't know what Paul thinks.

Maybe we'll be able to attract him with the fact that MDA helped Nash become a 2 time MVP, we can try to sell this to Paul like "look, MDA made Nash a 2 time MVP, he knows how to make the most out of a player like you etc...Harden can help you with the ball at times if needed...we have a player like Capela who plays similar to DeAndre and should fit like a glove with you"...

EDIT: just an example on the first part of the post, LMA made so much sense here a couple of years ago...think about this just a second.

- we had Harden and Dwight with a very solid core overall (Ariza, Beverley and a decent/good bench)...meanwhile the Spurs had a very old core with a declining Duncan, Parker, Ginobili, and Kawhi, which wasn't even close to be a star.

- we were coming out of a surprisingly good regular season ended with the conference finals...meanwhile the Spurs went out of the first round losing to the Clippers.

On paper, it made so much more sense to see LMA come to Houston instead of San Antonio, but in the end we know how that ended...and maybe it went that way just because LMA didn't really like Dwight.