Rockets luxury tax watch 2019: What we are doing and why it matters

While this makes sense .

You could just as easily punt in another year. I know harden will make more, but we could still maneuver to avoid most of the repeater tax .

Think about it , even if you are penalized with the repeater tax , if you are only 1 or 2 mil dollars over then it's no biggie .

 

Ariza at $15 MM. Johnson at $19 MM. Ellington at $6 MM. We'd be $20 MM+ into the luxury tax (would cost us $40 MM+ in salary plus lux tax payments) for a team that isn't appreciably better than what we have now.

 

Can't say that Nate is wrong.

 

I get the repeater tax … and the fact that you aren't likely to dethrone the Warriors this year (punchers chance) ….


But what bothers me is that you are going into next season with 7 players under contract , no draft picks , some tiny TPE's , only one of which is over the minimum and several key rotation pieces becoming UFA's with only non bird rights to keep them which really isn't competitive when you look at their performances - particularly Rivers and Faried , do you think they stay for 120% of their current salaries or do they go elsewhere for a payday ?
You could split the MLE between them but then you have 6 more roster spots and nothing but vet min's to offer and that probably means you lose House because you have nothing to match with over the minimum.
Is Shumpert part of the long term plan or is he just an expiring ? You either resign him via bird / early bird or he walks and you have another vet min on the roster.

They really don't have any financial tools to improve the roster without subtracting a significant piece of the rotation.

 

Well how else you expect Tilman to pay for his kids Air Jordan private jets.

Do you know how much private Jets cost these days? How many planes his kids needs?

We can't expect him to spend that money on the luxury tax. Geez, some people don't think!

 

Split tax-payer MLE between Faried and Rivers
Re-sign Shump for $7-9 MM per year using bird rights
Ideally, you come to a 2-year agreement with House (though this is appearing less and less likely)


Paul/Rivers
Harden/Gordon
Shumpert/House (?)
Tucker/Clark/Hartenstein
Capela/Faried/Nene

not the worst base to work from

 

Sure..... so how would you like it if your boss came to you and told you that you lost your starting small forward and back up small forward..... that you had to move a player making $20,000,000 a year.... AND have to find a starting small forward and fill out your roster with league minimum signings.

All the while doing this, you have to keep up the charade that the team is going to add players, because you can't have the team give up or the fan base not interested.

Tell me how you would do that...... because from my perspective....

Adding Shumpert, Rivers and Faried at this point is pretty damn good..... especially when you shed the $20,000,000 next year from Anderson's contract and all it cost you was lose ends, players you didn't want and a first rounder and two second rounders.

That seems like pretty God damn good work with those limitations....


Mean while we have Magic Johnson signing Lance Stephenson and adding Muscala.

 

I'm not going to tell you that it is ideal, because it really isn't. The reality is that the Anderson signing is going to continue to haunt us even after he is gone. However, we do have Bird Rights on the most important one, Iman Shumpert. They will be highly motivated to resign him. If they resign him, their top 6 players will be under contract.

The reality is that Rivers and Faried are not likely to be back.

I ultimately believe the piece that will be moved is Eric Gordon.

 

My only creative solution is if Rockets sign Shumpert to a large one year deal, like $20M to create an instant expiring that can be packaged with future picks to match salary. Of course, Rockets could have easily done that this year with Ariza, but instead chose to let him walk...

 

I'm not upset with Morey's job at the trade deadline. He actually (slightly) improved the team and somehow at the same time got us under the luxury tax....potentially enough to avoid the repeater tax.

If you're going to be upset, I would say it should be over the job Morey did last summer....signing scrubs and "names"....none of which are on the team 6 months later. The entire trade deadline was cleaning up the mess from that period while giving us SOME flexibility going forward. It's a damn shame it cost us so many draft picks but that's water under the bridge now.

And CP3.....dude you'd better friggin stay healthy going forward or start the contract renegotiation if not. (Like that would ever happen )

 

That's a movie title right there:

The Dreamshook Protocol

 

I'm starting to miss him too. Scolandry, Brooks, Lowry, Shane, and Ron gave us depth around Yao and McGrady. We got away from that later on to some extent, and this hurt us. Times have changed with new cap rules, but we should have been a bit deeper than where we are today.

 

This is valuable information and it does clarify a few things, but if you are planning to win an NBA Championship with Harden in the form of his life,then risks should have been taken. Someone earlier made a good comment that Houston should have started out with better role players at the beginning of the season. I wasn't against the Melo experiment once he was signed though.

 

Faried and Rivers are non-bird. Shumpert is Bird. At this point, the salary for 6 players is $116 million. I am not confident Morey is able to sign them.
Luxury tax really kill the chance of Championship.

 

I think the problem is if we sign House to a 2 year deal we are in the tax this season ... which is pretty much the opposite of what our primary goal was this deadline .

If we don't retain shumpert then I agree we are pretty ****ed .

EG is our main piece at that point and he is a key rotation player for us

That's the main reason why I'm not particularly fond of what went down the last couple of days . Knight and Chriss were our best salary matching pieces . Next year knight would have been an expiring too ; it would have been probable to trade and a pick for a big upgrade .

While I like shumpert . I don't like the fact he's expiring . I don't like trading Ennis who was getting rotation minutes just to save $. I don't like leaving MLE on the table when we have a young guy we can lock up for multiple years / bid for veterans .

You're right that we don't have a lot of vehicles available to take on salary ... and it's definitely true that we don't have the assets to pick up a good player on a cheap contract.

 

nope a min deal does not put them in the tax

 

Good post ...

This is an option , That's why I asked if he's resigned (might have been another thread) or if they just let him walk at seasons end. We also don't know if he's open to signing such a deal …. he may want long term security over a one year payday and losing his bird rights under your scenario.

Shumpert's - I'm not positive that he comes with Bird Rights which would allow them to make such an offer (I believe he does have full bird) …. But IF not , his salary this year is $11.011m and they'd at least have early bird rights allowing them to sign him to as much as $13.21m. Not a bad expiring , that would allow them to take back up to $15.95m ….

 

In theory, we could call House up on 3/24 and sign him to a two-year deal on the last day of the season. It'd only count $8k to this year's luxury tax calculation, so we'd be safe there

 

House won't sign a 2 - year min

He will sign for the min if it's just for the rest of this season

If we want to lock him up for longer then we have to offer more $

Or maybe our tactics of locking him out to lower his value scared him and he signs a 2 year min