If the Dwight rumor was true it would have been cool if Morey (the GM that annoys his peers) took a hard stance against Fegan (the agent that annoys the GM's) and just kept Parsons under contract regardless of any "wink-wink" promises. I guess Parsons would have been upset though, but we lost him anyways. A disgruntled Parsons locked into that low rate is still solid trade bait. The fact that we'd have to deal with Dwight's 2nd contract along with Fegan again soon wouldn't scare me. Dwight isn't going to leave a team because his agent is butthurt over some other client.
Disagree. This was a sooner or later issue (Chandler leaving). Unless Parson's ends up being TWICE as productive as Ariza, then Morey won, not lost. Morey made lemonade. Someone was bound to make him a big offer, this year or next. If it happened next year, Houston has no leverage. By it happening this year, we at least forced Cuban to overpay (aka Cuban may be the biggest loser). What Morey lost was getting Bosh. The Chandler issue was just pimple, at best.
History has shown that there was approximately a 5% chance of someone 1. making such an outlandish offer & 2. making it as soon as Cuban did. If you have a 95% chance of something working, you do it. Plus we had expectations that Bosh would sign with us if James went to the Cavs. That was the move to make. I completely agree with it. "If you're afraid of the wolves, get outta the forest!"
Of course it was, but you didn't understand it. In fact, I don't know how you missed it. You pulled out a post from January that clearly states my guess is that the Rockets are trying to compile the pieces to make a trade soon (for their third guy) and lock in Chandler. That means PULL OFF TRADE. Then LOCK IN CHANDLER. Never, at ANY point in time, was it a smart decision to sign Chandler Parsons to a big-dollar contract before acquiring their third-best player. Read this from early June: http://rockets.clutchfans.net/6797/jeremy-lin-omer-asik-remember-when-rockets/ There were positives to making Chandler a restricted free agent -- I outlined them there -- but you had to get your ducks in a row first. My mistake was assuming the Rockets knew this danger and had it under control -- that, by making Chandler a restricted free agent, the Rockets had a free agency signing in the bag or a fallback trade they could turn to before locking in Chandler. They didn't have anything in their pocket, and a big mistake it was. justtxyank -- I expect you to acknowledge this huge difference between your claim and the reality of the situation.
If you believe someone will make him a bigger offer than you're willing to pay, you package him and his Bird Rights in a trade. This could be especially helpful if, just as an example, you were unable to land a star FA in the offeason...
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>Mavs think Chandler Parsons can be their LeBron when it comes to recruiting future free agents: <a href="http://t.co/lboGtnsaBo">http://t.co/lboGtnsaBo</a></p>— Art Garcia (@ArtGarcia92) <a href="https://twitter.com/ArtGarcia92/statuses/489780750112141314">July 17, 2014</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Morey would be blasted either way. Keep him at $1 mil and Morey is a Slaver anti humanist who will piss Parsons off all season. Make him restricted and he's an idiot for doing so.
Another reason, that I think gets glossed over, is DM prob saw the slew of upper level sf available this offseason (Haywood, PP, Ariza, Melo, Deng, Marion) and figured it would drive the price down a bit - figured 3 or 4 years at a reasonable level was better than 1 cheap year and 3 or 4 inflated years.... then Cuban went full tard....
Clutch, I tried to explain in my post at the bottom that I wasn't actually going after your position one way or another because I don't fully know how you feel. My point was to use your posts to explain why the feeling on the board that letting Parsons into RFA had no logical basis is wrong. Your posts are just the easiest to pull up. I'd say you and BIMA are easily the most respected posters on the board. When either of you posts something, almost everyone reads it. Yes? Both of you walked through rational reasons why letting Parsons into RFA could work for the Rockets that didn't involve some devil payoff to the agent. That was my point. If you read the threads going on right now it seems like the only logical reason anyone can come up with is that the agent had to have a backroom deal with Morey. My point was a decision can backfire without it being an illogical decision. But I am sorry if I ruffled your feathers because that is certainly not what I intended and if my post misconstrues your position I apologize for that.
I think this is a quality post, and an excellent way of reviewing the "HOW THE HELL DID THIS HAPPEN??" question. The thing I would like to note is that a lot of these thoughts on the Chandler Parsons contract that went back basically months and in some cases YEARS (I think first Parsons contract column was in more than a year ago) were not taking into consideration what the market was going to be come June 30th, 2014, and they weren't taking into consideration the fact that the Rockets should have known that Parsons wanted to leave either way to try his hand at becoming a superstar. It was pretty much a hypothetical based on how RFA markets "typically" act. However Morey should have had the foresight to see weeks before that the Lebron situation has drastically altered the "typical" market & then you factor in other variables that came in at the last minute that changed teams spending patterns. This free agency period was very typical until the Miami opt outs happened and it all the sudden became very "Atypical". Nobody could have seen that one coming. -Keep in mind the statement BimaThug used in "chilling the market". With Bledsoe & Monroe, this is hugely the case & could lead to Phoenix & Detroit getting huge salary breaks in their next deals. However you have to look at the Supply and Demand of the market and see that the market for both Bledsoe & Monroe on huge contracts aren't exactly what you think when you look at the major players in the 2014 free agency race. Most of the teams that were set to "Swing and Miss" on Lebron/Melo/Love wouldn't be looking at Bledsoe & Monroe as consolation prizes if they missed on the big fish. Maybe they should have but they weren't even focused on them. Morey should have been able to gauge who would be next in line for the teams that were going to swing and ultimately miss on Lebron & Melo... IE Dallas, LAL, and themselves to see what would be the next person up. Morey should have been plugged in to know that if these teams strike out on their superstar SF, that Parsons was absolutely going to be next in line to pursue. Morey had up until June 30th to make that assessment, and should have seen Dallas & others coming with a potential max deal. When you look back to see similar cases (one we should know well).... this is a good reason why OKC didn't send James Harden into RFA and "match any offer". They accurately assessed the future market & the players ultimate desires to make the decision that they need to get out in front and trade him while he had value. The only difference potentially is that Harden became a star after the move (which ultimately made it a poor trade), and Parsons' stardom is yet to be seen. Either way though, I am still critical of the Rockets not being to accurately assess the Market, and Chandlers desires that would play into him scheming his way out of Houston by working with Cuban/Fegen to develop a contract that they knew Morey wouldn't match. My guess is Morey thought they could ultimately keep Parsons and might even get a discount if the market cooled on him, but he wasn't taking into consideration what he should have already known.... that Parsons wanted to leave to become a superstar, and that there were ways in which he could develop a contract that keeps the Rockets from matching that offer. Morey made a huge mistake, and I'm sure he's beating himself up for not trading him when he had the chance to last year just as much if not more than we will be for the foreseeable future. We are just going to have to wait and see if Morey is able to recover like he normally does, and end up in a better position in the long run.
You can't do any sort of competitive environment where information levels are fairly symmetric and win every time. I'm just glad Morey isn't someone who chases his losses like so many teams.
This is a good post. Note that I was personally against the RFA route. I'm not really sure Morey misjudged the market. We won't ever know because he'll never answer honestly, but I'm sure he thought it was possible Parsons would get a max deal and that he would simply match it. What I don't think he bet on were the following: 1) Missing out on all of this targets: This is probably his biggest weakness as a GM. His arrogance. He believes things will work out in his favor just because of the odds. 2) Misjudging Parsons: You touched on this, but I think Morey believed Parsons was fine to be a glue guy for the Rockets. He and Parsons had a close relationship, Parsons and McHale had a close relationship..I don't think he predicted at all that Parsons might go sign a contract that would have aspects of it that would make it hard for him to match. I think he honestly believed that Parsons would give him the time to do what he needed to do and make an effort to be a Rocket. That was clearly not the case.
Are you SURE about that...??? I don't think those two players make that statement necessarily true. Just because those two RFA aren't getting offers doesn't mean other ones don't. Morey should have held on to Parsons and did him like OKC did Harden. Simple as that.
But that point doesn't stand at all. Let's say the Rockets traded Jeremy Lin and gave up 12 first round picks to unload him. Fans are angry and can't believe the Rockets gave up that many draft picks. What you're doing is pulling up posts from fans beforehand saying the Rockets should trade Jeremy Lin. In my case, you're pointing out that I said there were positives to playing the restricted free agency game with Chandler and ignoring what I said the Rockets needed to do before that. The Rockets had to get someone else before locking in Chandler. That was always spelled out clearly by me.
Yeah and if he would have kept him locked into that deal, he almost certainly would have had to trade him and then people would be pissed about that. In hindsight though, keeping him only to trade him would have been the best option considering we lost him anyways and got nothing in return, but all indications point to the fact that they actually wanted to flat out keep him. They just wanted him to be the 4th option instead of the 3rd. That meant not making him play another year for peanuts when they didn't have to. Keeping him locked into that contract would have created bad blood between him and the organization and most people in that situation would leave as soon as the opportunity presented itself. You can't account for the fact that a guy like Dirk Nowitzki would take an 8 million dollar contract and be paid almost half of what a guy like Parsons would make. Wasting another year of Howard and Harden while waiting for free agency of 2015 where we were supposedly going to target Aldridge or Love seems be a bad idea with Love possibly being traded and re-upping with his new team and Aldridge possibly extending. Morey decided to go all in this summer. It didn't end up working out, but I think a lot of that falls at the feet of Howard and Harden. Guys didn't want to team up with them. Morey had everything in place on a silver platter and Lowry, Melo and Bosh turned us down.
Exactly! This was a blunder by Morey. Morey completely underestimated Parsons value on the open market.
