That was just an excuse to unload Capela's contract. Fertitta didn't want to pay the luxury tax then nor ever. The whole small ball thing was a gimmick and fabricated to cover up for staying cheap.
He is a top 10 offensive player. Unanimously. Many will have him higher than that. And he was traded for the equivalent of a role player and one second round pick. Comparing it to the capela trade is ridiculous. It will go down as one of the worst trades in nfl history.
If the goal was to save money and you were willing to trade capela there's better ways to do it than just trade for Roco. It saved them like 3M a year and also cost the Rockets their 2020 FRP. Even if Tillman just wanted to save cash they could have used Capela to unload EG or w/e for example. They could have traded Capela for a 2nd round pick straight up I'm sure some team would accept him with open arms and wipe his entire salary off the books. It doesnt make sense to use LTS as the reason for the trade if that was the goal thwre was much better ways to go about it. The Rox microball could have worked but they needed extreme depth cuz guys got worn out defending bigger opponents. They needed Dumbtoni to reduce pt to 28 mins max per player and give everyone lots of burn instead he did his usual dumbtoni "play the starters to the ground cuz I'm dumb" tactic thats why that squad never went anywhere.
coincidentally, just like the other moves we made...that 3 million was handy in saving us to get under the luxury tax...Not many teams have an exception to swallow the contracts whole. Theres a reason the year before we were holding on to melo for months to trade him despite being a minimum player. that tax line has reprecussion let alone to end up as there. And juding by most of our moves, I'm talking the Knight trade which also inclued a first that was soley for tax reasons, its not a new type of move "“Last year (getting under the luxury tax) was a fluke. We were going to be in the (tax). It was an accident. I’m still trying to figure out how we got under. I was positive we were going to be in it by $11 million. But if I’m in the luxury tax, I expect us to win.”" "This refusal to spend money became farcical once Alexander sold the team to Tilman Fertitta in 2017. Fertitta spent so much money ($2.2 billion) to purchase the Rockets that he may not have had the liquidity to go into the red to build a title contender. Houston was a laughingstock around the league for the amount of juggling it had to do to stay under the tax. The best example came at the trade deadline last season, when Morey used a future first-round pick to shed the salaries of Brandon Knight and Marquese Chriss. There was no basketball reason for the move. It was just done to cut costs. It’s not that Knight and Chriss would have helped the Rockets. But there were certainly a lot of better things that Morey could have used that pick for."
Agreed. He is a terrible pick and roll player https://www.nba.com/stats/players/b...on&sort=PPP&dir=1&CF=POSS_PCT*GE*15:POSS*GE*4
