Shams - Philly offered Simmons/Thybulle + draft compensation. Did we make the right deal?

when they got Oladipo, they said it was because he was an all star and they felt he gave them the best chance to win...then we proceeded to continue to sink to the bottom and they said they felt levert would change that...levert and allen are assets, more tradeable bc they aren't expiriing with a destination planned like oladipo, but they aren't going to lead this roster to the playoffs.

So they've given mixed messages choosing all expirings and then saying its to get better yada yada

Same thing could've beendone with Simmons. We take him, showcase and flip him. His value wasn't as bad mid season as it is now, and we would've gotten more picks for simmons than we got back with oladipo, maybe levert and allen get us an extra pick too and not one from a really good team thats likely to be late.

Theres just options. Even okc, they just sent al horford home to keep on tanking.

In teh end of hte day, our main goal worked out we kept our pick and we got a young star. I don't thinkk simmons was the right pick, but I also think we dropped the ball with oladipo too.

One mor eseason, one more cornerstone...then we lift.

 

Hmmm perhaps we think of cause and effect differently. You don't think team building is a tangled web where everything affects everything?

You believe that the no 2 pick and kpj (who came from the cavs after taurean prince locker room incident) would have happened with the ben simmons trade? If you could go back in time would you do the ben simmons trade?

Stone has spoken about risk/reward analysis in his decisions. There is always an element of luck when embracing uncertainty - but it was calculated.

 

i couldn't careless about the ben simmons scenario or kpj. None of that matters with what I'm talking about

 

These guys trying to rewrite history now.

 

We certainly could've gotten more for simmons than we did for oladipo but I don't think that return compensates for the rest of the Philly package. I don't believe two protected philly picks, Thybulle, plus the return we would get for Simmons after a flip was more valuable to this franchises long term goals than the unprotected nets draft assets pushed out to 2027.

At least there is plenty of things that can go wrong for the nets between now and 2027 with our last few Nets draft assets.

Stone's career background before he became a front office guy tells me he is very comfortable operating in uncertain and ambiguous situations. He's always preaching flexibility and how picks can be currency as trade bait or guys you develop.

Stone has our asset management on a great timeline where there is still a reasonable chance of it all coming together at once to create a contender sometime in the next 3-10 years. Just must be patient.

Stone has def made mistakes along the way but I'm buying into Stone as an architect who has a big picture plan and multiple contingency plans. I believe the plan was always to flip Oladipo at the deadline if he didn't work out but his injury and miami lust as an expiring killed his value. That was a mistake but I feel as if he did that for Silas because he wasn't fully committed to tanking in 2021 yet.

He puts himself in positions where he has flexibility to adjust as circumstances change.

 

Like I keep telling you..... stop playing gotcha, It's embarrassing how simple concepts go over your head because you can't think through anything.

Choosing the picks (AKA the Nets package) over choosing a blue chip player (AKA Simmons package) is what caused us to be bad which caused us to have the best odds for a top pick.

It's basic cause and effect.

Another poster who can't think critically.....

 

It’s always the same ones. No surprise

 

So we exchange Harden for Dipo but that's not why we were bad and kept our top 4 pick.....

Tilman and by extension Stone choose to rebuild by taking the Nets package.

 

Don't be fooled by press conferences, go by actions.

Dipo was never resigning with the Rockets, it was just a pit stop. Like I originally said we got lucky in keeping our pick, but we did choose to rebuild. Nets picks + Dipo was the rebuilding package and Simmons was the retool package.

 

Nope, you just don't understand cause and effect.

Nets package was rebuilding

Simmons package was retooling.

It's pretty simple. Sure, you can play "what if" but the odds were low we were going to flip Simmons in a similar fashion to Dipo. I think you are smart enough to see they are two very different players.

 

Yes, they ARE 2 different players.

Simmons is actually still a true All Star and would have given Rockets a MUCH greater return.

 

But instead we went with Dipo + picks for the rebuild which is smarter than Simmons. The haul for Simmons would still dwarf the Nets picks.

Bottomline, the Rockets picked right with the rebuild.

 

Exactly, I agree...thats what makes it that much of a terrible trade. Oladipo had let it be known he wants miami and miami let it be known they want him from before the trade.

So its not even just vs the simmons retool package

its dipo vs allen/Levert
Levert has mroe years he could easily be flipped into a first this summer,heck landry shamet was flipped for a first...allen another sign and trade or a way better veresion of what we did with dipo in showcase and trade.

All in all, we got through where we needed to which was a direction...but the 'landrys' trademark cost saving moves and deflecting or lying were still there, it just matters way less when we're not competing

 

The thing you are forgetting is the Rox were in a fluid situation. We thought Cousins was still good (just needed time to get in game shape), Wall was playing and putting up stats and C.Wood was playing like an allstar. At the time seemed like the Rox had no chance to be the worst team in the L, hell I thought they would be a playoff team once they added Dipo.

Allen is an expiring just like Olynk and Dipo, and the Allen trade turned out great for the Rockets. They got a FRP from Cleveland (detroit frp) which was used to get Sengun. One thing you forget is Taurean Prince and his 12M were also part of the package, the Rox cant accept both Allen and Prince without paying tax so that's no Bueno. Also, since Cleveland took in both Prince and Levert they ended up moving KPJ's locker to the back and he threw food and got traded to us. In short no Allen trade no KPJ and no Sengun. Doesnt matter if it was blind luck, the Allen trade massively worked out in favor of the Rox.

Levert....the Rox just preferred to take a chance on a former all star like Dipo. In retrospect yeah Levert was more flippable cuz he is signed long term. The Rox just took a gamble and failed on that one. But on the plus side since Dipo turned out bad the Rox ended up tanking. I'd rather get no 2 pick than no 18 cuz we had levert winning games. And no, Levert aint gonna sit on the bench when he is healthy thats like begging for a penalty from the commisioner. Levert isnt Al Horford you cant sit him without reason the dude's like 25.

The real miss is taking Rodians Kurucs over Nic Claxton. Rox took a blind stab at adding an unknown and picked the wrong prospect.

All in all Harden trade could've been A if they took Levert and flipped him for picks instead of Dipo and they got Nic Claxton instead of Rodians Kurucs. However even if they botched those 2 aspects I think the trade is still a solid B.

 

I didn't. I could see guys like woods overachieving, the talent in the nba is enough that any given night teams ccan win with a spark, but ultmately if you look at the talent, we weren't sniffing the vets in the top 8, most liklely top 10.

And then oladipo was also coming off two injury prone seasons and terrible this season let alone wanting to be out...it was a peculiar choice when he let that be known that'd we'd ignore it ironically right after two stars had just demanded out that we don't play with taht fire gain. So that why i suspect it was for cost cutting, because thats teh trend we did years before too under tilman. And then we traded again only for expirings. Then even just declined bradleys option when we had the option.

The FRP pick we got was Milwaukee...not clevelands/detroits. The detroit FRP was with our wood/Tervor Ariza dealings.

We could've taken that, and then traded by the deadline to get under the tax...whcih we did EACH YEAR We were competing. So once again it just depended where we are in our franchise with owner mandates. Atlanta took on bad contracts to add assets, thunder keep doing it. they will take care of things to make sure it helps our long term, our biggest priority has been savings and then with that guise thats the issue.

levert wasn't going to win you games, neither is allen. They are both good players, none of them are changing the tide on a team so bad and young like us, we could rest em like very other tanking team, basically we have options....and we have options with their contracts, all that we did not have with Dipo and plus with dipo and miami letting it be known they have mutual interest our leverage was gone from the statars.

You can sit him bc if the franchise is going another place. You can move the ball away from him, you can not ply him back to backs, you can also know he may have hot games but him with a team of young dleaguers which is what we were last year isn't going to win anyway in the west. And we got lowest seed handedly, we could sit him towards the end. Everyone gets how tanking and direction of the franchise works, every agent, every player. We're not dealing with harden or some superstar with clout, we're talking about Levert and Allen. Its justn ot hte same case imo.

I don't blame Stone that much. I do think it was a miss of a move, but when its financially strapped thats a mandate with your owner. Stone has done well, chosen late picks great. I like it. Tilman is still tilman, sadly and our moves keep showing that. Its like iwth morey ,when we got a new owner all of a suddent htose assets just become trade pieces to get under teh tax.. and as you mentioend we can start under the tax but as long as we get out before the deadline like we did with Knight/first round pick when harden was here, or cutting house for 2 months...we can adjust.

 

I guess I'd look at it like this.
Simmons, lets be very prudent and just say 2 first rounders.
Thbulle, 1 first roudner(shamet just got one)
And then phillys 2 protected picks

vs nets picks which are likely also late first rounders with KD resigning.
thats 5-4, but just obviously throwing out a scenerio that doesn't seemed far fetched,

And the bucks pick we got for allen is also a late one. We may have traded harden literally for four late first rounders which is terrible.
I think we prioritized expirings for money savings bc why else would we get an oft injured oladipo with two inefficeint years in his belt and the wrong side of 30 he was turning and he had also let it be known his goal is miami and miami said they had options to sign him outright this summer if they wanted to...tehre was 0 leverage from the beggining.

or it was another one of tilman's i was going to be in the tax bc jimmy butler was coming and then daryl this and that and im just an innocent bystander talk.

I also buy into stone so far, just in terms of woods and finding gems he did a good job of a messy situation. This really isn't his issue, just like with darylhttps://www.theringer.com/nba/2020/10/16/21519593/daryl-morey-houston-rockets-luxury-tax-resign

he can't just spend the owners money like some teams, the owner has the budget and mandate and they have to work within those confines and mandates. and stone has to do that if it was expiring bc there was very little basketball reasons to do it...reminds me of the following, people blame darryl but for him these moves gave no future flexiblity, threw away assets he got toe get better, but once again the owner has to sign the check and makes the call

But getting 90 percent of the production for 50 percent of the price ended up backfiring once they got there. The Warriors exposed Houston’s lack of versatility, most famously when the Rockets missed 27 straight 3s in Game 7 of the Western Conference finals in 2018. Morey was criticized for not having a Plan B when his team went cold from the perimeter, but he couldn’t have asked limited offensive players like Ariza and Tucker to take pull-up jumpers, break down defenses off the dribble, or hit cutters out of the high post. Building a team with established veterans who play fundamentally sound basketball on both ends of the floor costs a lot of money.


And that was the one thing that Morey never really had. According to the cap numbers at Spotrac, which go back to the 2010-11 season, the Rockets barely went over the luxury tax (just $3.65 million over) in their one season (2015-16) as a taxpayer. The Warriors spent $49.63 million in penalties over the last five seasons, while even the small-market Thunder spent $33.73 million. There was no excuse for Houston to not open up the checkbook. This is a franchise located in the fourth-biggest metro area in the U.S. that has had a superstar in the prime of his career. Alexander sat on his hands while Houston’s rivals went all in, counting on Morey’s ability to use advanced statistics to turn water into wine.



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.


Houston also spent that season in a bizarre staring contest with Danuel House Jr. House is the kind of diamond in the rough that Morey routinely uncovered in Houston, an undrafted free agent on a two-way contract who would become a starting-caliber wing. The problem was that players on those deals can spend only 45 days with the NBA team during the season before their contracts have to be converted. Money in Houston was so tight that Morey had to send House back to the G League when he wouldn’t sign a below-market long-term deal. He replaced House with two players he signed off the street (Gerald Green and Kenneth Faried) before bringing him back right before the playoffs. It’s not like House was asking for the world. He signed a three-year, $11 million contract in the offseason. But even that was more than Morey could offer at the time.


Houston’s limited financial flexibility became an even bigger issue last season after the trade for Westbrook. With the team’s two best players costing a combined $76.7 million, it became almost impossible for Morey to fill out the roster while staying under the luxury tax. Morey and head coach Mike D’Antoni had to conjure up production from players other teams didn’t want. Jeff Green went from being cut by the Jazz to being a crucial piece of the Rockets’ small-ball attack in the playoffs. It was the same story with Austin Rivers, who had been on three teams in five seasons before landing in Houston, and Ben McLemore, who had one foot out of the NBA before the Rockets turned him into a 3-point sniper. All were more valuable in Houston than anywhere else in the league because Morey identified what they could do well and put them in roles that didn’t ask them to do much else."​

 

You completely ignored the point I made. This isn't about being able to flip Simmons or a support for Wall. This is about a diminishing flawed asset that is being compensated over the next 4 years as a superstar. That will kill your team. Philly isn't just trying to flip him, they are trying to get back the value they are going to lose because of how they valued Simmons and what they gave up to keep him. This is about opportunity cost. Daryl didn't lose his mind, he is desperate for the reason I just mentioned.

It's funny you are recommending that we trade for Simmons and then with the same logic argue we can flip him later. Have you learned nothing from the CP3->Brodie->Wall debacle we are living through now? Everything you say about Simmons is wishful thinking because you are a fan of his. I was too. This isn't just about this year, this is not a rookie, this is a fixed pattern with a player on his second contract. You say he cares so much like that helps your argument. Your argument is essentially, Simmons wants it so bad that he works hard every year on his shot but despite all of that hard work he is so afraid because he knows he sucks at shooting and it will never get better. I would argue Simmons tries harder in passing and D because he knows how bad he sucks at shooting. You want Simmons on this team at his current contract not understanding what we would be giving up by taking him on instead of making better choices. At $37M a year we can do much better than Simmons. Philly did when they had Butler and Simmons. That is what you need to look at when analyzing this situation properly. Simmons at $30M less along with Butler was reasonable.

Your points about LBJ, socialite, and even Wall are irrelevant and have no correlation or were even mentioned by me. You completely misunderstood the Faried and Wiggins analogy. All are players on high contracts with diminishing value. Simmons trade value is NOT at its lowest point and that IS the problem a year down the line. Your stat analysis is deeply flawed because Ben Simmons is not Clint Capela but their offensive output is the same type. That doesn't work for a PG or a wing. Go back and study Harden to understand the impact a PG has on the D. Look at wing defenders who cannot shoot and tell me how that works from a starter's minutes perspective. Do they make $37M? If you are paying someone $37M you better get it right. Ask Joel Embiid what he thinks? Granted he has not been consistently healthy and worn down but like Harden I would argue that is directly correlated to having to carry the damn team all the time because he is not getting the help he was promised. After all with Butler, they were one ball bouncing off the rim the other way from a chip.

 

Top 10 means the pick goes to the Nets and the Rox pick 18th, which is my point. Levert isnt a difference maker either way I'd rather have top 2 pick.

Again Allen is an expiring, this has been repeated ag nauseum. What you wanna discuss is will the Rox spend 20+M to keep him around, and not whether he was included in the deal kr w/e.

I dont think Tillman is as cheap as people say, he said he will go over the tax if the team made the finals, they didnt. So its the Rox who couldnt uphold their part of the bargain and not Fertita.

 

There’s not a single team that would give 4 unprotected picks and swaps for Simmons right now. I don’t know how you can argue that.

 

The cp3,brodie, wall trade makes no comparasion to simmons.

Wall has not played for 2 years, is inefficient. In fact Simmons can do everything he does but better outside of shooting which isn't saying much. Hes more athletic, younger, taller, more efficient PG. and hes 25...how is this a comparasion?

For phily he is a corner stone, for us we got soley brooklyn nets more than likely to be later picks, so we are only comparing a return to what we got. Simmons mid season has better value for a 'flip' then oladipo which is what we tried. Daryl is trying to get a franchise back bc that is their 2nd star.

I am not a 'fan' of simmons. I give respect where its due. The guy has a terrible shot and that is dumbfounding since it seems mental, especialyl ree throws...but literally every other thing in this game he does at an elite level. Very rarely can you find a 6'10 guy whose athletic, takes pride on defense and is an absolute disruptoer...hes always played 2nd fiddle to a big man on the post. You give him a team 4 out, he'd be 20-10-9 type of player. I do think he has get his shooting down or hes going to really have a hole in his career, but thats a far far description from saying he absolutely sucks at 25 has terrible value and comparing him to John Wall whose almost worthless on teh court and even at his peak was ineffiicent.

Thats where we disagree. I believe simmons from his performance and the over excitement online, similar to remember when CP3 got traded pople htought he was done based on..one year...

So once again, ben simmons isn't a traditional PG. Just like Draymond Green maybe trash on some teams, teh right team hes a champion despite his flaws and holes and hes an all star or dpoy on that championship team. ben smmons can be that but better.