The Houston Rockets went into payroll-purging mode this offseason, using a combination of trades, amnesty waivers, buyouts and expiring contracts to wipe Kyle Lowry, Goran Dragic, Luis Scola, Marcus Camby, Samuel Dalembert and others off the books. That left the Rockets with just enough money to sign Jeremy Lin and Omer Asik to offer sheets, and possibly throw together a reasonable trade offer for their top target, Dwight Howard.
The Rockets are still without Howard, though. Lin and Kevin Martin may make up a dynamic backcourt, and Chandler Parsons remains an exciting prospect, but until Houston gets Howard, all of its salary dumping will have been in vain.
A year after the lockout began, the NBA is in the middle of a summer that may be even crazier than the last one. High-profile players such as Steve Nash and Joe Johnson changed teams, but just as noteworthy were the moves that were not made — as well as the preliminary moves that were made to facilitate those moves that never occurred.
The Rockets were not the only team that made a series of tough decisions to free up the money required under the collective bargaining agreement to acquire new players. The Minnesota Timberwolves did the same, but the Wolves may need to buy a few more calculators for their accounting department. Because while the Rockets' cash dumps totaled just enough theoretically to bring Howard and a collection of undesired Magic cast-offs to Houston, the Wolves offered free agents money they did not even have.
The Portland Trail Blazers matched Minnesota's offer sheet to Nicolas Batum on Wednesday, meaning Batum will not be a member of the Wolves next season. Although the Wolves are sorely in need of someone to bolster them on the wing, losing out on Batum is not the worst news for them.
Minnesota made a flurry of moves before making offers to Batum and former Blazers teammate Brandon Roy, ostensibly to create money for the two free agents. The Wolves waived Martell Webster and Brad Miller, renounced their rights to Anthony Tolliver and put Darko Milicic on amnesty waivers, yet all that still did not clear enough cap space to sign both Batum and Roy. They now have a gross loss of five players (Webster, Miller, Tolliver, Milicic and Batum), and the one they do have, Roy, is coming out of retirement after knee injuries supposedly ended his career.
Players can be replaced, however, and any of them conceivably could be signed to new contracts. Tolliver, for one, is already a candidate to be re-signed by the Wolves now that Batum is staying in Portland. The amnesty provision is a one-shot opportunity, though, and neither Milicic nor Scola held cancerous contracts. (Milicic was in the final year of a relatively reasonable $5.2 million deal, while Scola's $9.4 million salary for this season was just about right for a power forward of his caliber.) The Wolves and Rockets were under no direct pressure to use their amnesty provisions — teams maintain the right to utilize the amnesty waiver through 2016 — but now they have used their trump cards. The loss of amnesty rights is far more costly than the loss of a couple of middling rotation players.
If the moves by the Rockets and Wolves seem crazy, get used to it. As the luxury tax becomes more punitive and players gain a better grasp of CBA rules that benefit them for signing with their own teams, clubs will need to get more creative and more aggressive to create the salary cap room necessary to acquire new talent. If a star player becomes available, some executives will do as the Rockets and Wolves did, and simply close their eyes and jump. This means a lot more Luis Scolas are going to get waived to make room for the Dwight Howards who never materialize.
The old joke about NBA general managers needing a degree from Harvard Business School to navigate the CBA is only partly true now. In addition to an MBA, they might also need a parachute to survive their leaps of faith.
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