If CLEE and camby are unrestricted free agent, what is the purpose to them signing with the rockets to be traded rather than just signing with the team they intend to play for?
for example, knicks dont have the cap to sign camby...in that case we sign him and trade him to new york and get a pick and a player with small cheap 1 yr contract..maybe unguarnteed or something.
Camby wants $3M+, Lee wants $5-6M+. Most of the teams interested in either guy can't offer them that much money (no cap space and (tax) MLE already used; MLE not enough for Lee[?]), hence the only way for them to play for those teams is via sign and trade.
Dont know if this still holds true, but does the home team still get to give an extra year? So more money I guess.
We are creating a bidding war between playoff caliber teams who wouldn't otherwise be able to sign these guys due to the cap. Basically, the Unrestricted free agent has the right to choose any team he wants, but the Rockets have the ability to dictate which teams can sign that player for the most money, depending on their willingness to write the contract and then trade assets to us plus some deadweight contracts to balance out the trade. So considering that money is still a big deal to these free agents, we have a considerable amount of leverage in influencing the eventual destination of all the free agents that used to play for us. Since these aren't max type players, the hometown advantage of offering max dollars never comes into play. And as someone else said, sign and trade deals can no longer offer an extra year either. As an added bonus, the fact that we are so far under the cap allows us to take on even more salary than we are sending out via the sign and trade, if only the other team will include even better assets in the process. Say Miami wants Camby badly. They could trade us Mike Miller or some other relatively bad contact for him, but they would have to really make it worth our while to do so, by adding multiple draft picks or so. We would be going from having no contract to having Miller's contract, so they would have to compensate us for taking on that money.
So, in theory, could a player like Camby do a sign and trade with a team that's not the Rockets? How come players always do sign and trades signing with their home team?
No, only with teams under whose contract they currently are. Remember Pippen back in 199? Read the article in the link. It talks about how potential teammates sign with current team just to allow sign-and-trade players to come in under cap.
it also has to do with their bird rights transferring and the percentage of the raise from one year to the next.
Not that it matters, but this isn't the case anymore. http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/page/CBA-111128/how-new-nba-deal-compares-last-one
