Rockets trade TyTy Washington and Usman Garuba + stuff to Atlanta for Alpha Kaba

Does he want to come to Houston? Does he have a plane ticket in rime for the regular season?

 

This is the infuriating part. There were seven raw talent that anyone with 2 eyes could see that we couldn't develop within a short window.

But you don't buy high, sell low when other GMs know you're dumping for space to land a free agent. You esp don't overpay for Lopez then throw that money on Brooks when you fail.

Rockets FO got outplayed like a bad hand of Spades. Their cap mgmt was rigid and the FA class didn't work with their time table set by the WB trade. Other teams invested time on keeping tabs on our situation, we sure as hell didn't count their cards.

Adding more young talent sounds smart to keep the future fresh, but we're definitely not at that phase. Work on the remaining rookie talent and pray for the best.

 

so basically we had to use future draft capital to move rookie scale contracts... frps 1 and 2 years removed from drafting...


...thats just sad.

 

Stone didn't make any good trade so far.
Sign

 

Judging by observation over the last few years => Stone “holds on” or “over pays” players because he is out classed and overwhelmed by the other GMs and player agents. Maybe Lucas can help.

We traded for what looks like professional wrestler in Alpha Kaba. Even the name has a circus sound to it. Alpha the last of the American Gladiators. Then Llull popped into my thoughts. Over all it’s entertaining but not in a good way.

 

Worst is his surname, Kaba means rude in Turkish Alpha male/Alpha rude. He is a good basketball player with an unfortunate name combination.

 

LOL the outrage over 2nd round picks is too good to be true even for this place! Something tells me that even if the moves would have landed Brook Lopez ClutchFans would still be grumpy.

 

"Pathetic" also comes to mind.

 

This isn't a hard concept to understand. Nobody cares about the actual player that could be drafted by a 2nd round pick. But what the last week has shown is that HAVING 2nd round picks can get you into the mix in terms of 3 team trades, cap flexibility, salary dumps, etc. All of those are important vehicles in cap maneuvering, and Stone literally just threw 4 2nd rounders in the damn dumpster for no reason. Sure, we can buy more down the line if need be, but why waste more resources on something when you didn't need to lose them in the first place?? It's bad asset management, and something you'd expect an NBA GM to be better at.

 

It's like posters don't understand the value of assets in the NBA, willing to overpay mediocre players, giving away players with potential and handing out draft assets like Halloween candy. It reminds me of when Isaiah Thomas was running the Knicks as a GM. Literally, the only thing Stone has done well is draft, and many reports say the drafting should be attributed to Eli Witus, the assistant GM.

 

Nikola Jokic was picked at 41.

 

Nice reductive take lol

 

KJ Martin was a second rounder as well. And he was the one young player they dealt who actually netted them positive assets. There are starting lineups across the league full of second rounders; his argument holds no weight.

 

I know right! How will we possibly compete this year without those 2nd rounders and paying the luxury tax?

 

The FVV contract by itself would be the biggest asset in any trade scenario - The Brooks deal could be harder depending on how he rehabs his image here and if the league views him as a + player for possible contending teams in a trade. It was an overpay with trades at the forefront of the thinking moving forward with little long term commitment. Front office has said as much. Getting huffy puffy over 2nd rounders is crazy when like you said they can be bought quite easily.

 

As per usual, I'm somewhere in the middle of the GARM argument. I see the point of the people who say they it's hard to get upset about losing prospects who weren't getting much playing time and some future second rounders. But at the end of the day, I tend to lean slightly the other way. Even if those assets didn't have a ton of value, collectively they lost value across the board, and it's just genuinely really poor asset management.

I don't think the TyTy, Garuba, Christopher, etc. dumps are that bad in a vacuum, but when you pair it with the KJ deal, the Mills flip and the increasingly awful Brooks contract, collectively the whole thing just stinks. If we're going to give Stone an "A" grade for the first part of the offseason for Ime, the draft and the FVV signing, he also deserves an "F" for everything since minus the Landale and Green deals. Overall, at the end of the day, the team is clearly better, so I'm not going to lose too much sleep over it. But it doesn't change the fact that the front office made some truly poor decisions this offseason and at least one of them (the Brooks deal) could have some pretty bad ramifications down the line.

 

Agree and this is where I sit as well. Stone did some good stuff and then seemed to panic, and made some poor asset management decisions. I honestly believe Presti is trying to do anything he can to bone us after the Harden steal by Morey.

Maybe Lucas can help him (as @fattz mentioned), but I'm just not sure he's the guy to build a championship team. I hope he proves me wrong.

 

If they had added Lopez, it would be easy to play the "who cares about the 2nd rounders" card. But when you consider they whiffed on him, the loss of value by losing their young prospects and dumping a bunch of seconds for cap space they just wasted by overpaying role players just compounds everything. You can't just look at the loss of the 2nds by themselves in a vacuum. The whole thing collectively was one big failure that could have been avoided. I won't sit here and say the whole offseason has been bad, because they genuinely nailed everything up to that point, but if we're going to give Stone credit for his successes, he equally deserves criticism for his mistakes. This was a big one.

 

This is more about saving face than losing anything substantial. If my understanding of the situation is correct then Stone had a verbal commitment from Lopez that fell apart - what can you do in that instance when the moves were already made in preparation for that? Now all of a sudden the FVV/Brooks deals are egregious overpays when prior to the actual signings the hot topic here was reaching the salary floor! LOL I mean which is it? I know its romantic to think we had a line of free agents to choose from banging down Stones door to come play here, but it was never the case. A team as shitty as this always overpays.