For Deckard: Hypothetical Scenario to Acquire Lebron

In another thread, Deckard requested that I "giving your takes on how Morey could come up with a major move or two this off-season, given the difficulties involved."

http://bbs.clutchfans.net/index.php...ound-picks-lebron.291505/page-9#post-11812033

Ask and you shall recieve. Here you go Deckard.

The Rockets currently have $78M in committed salary for next season. That covers Harden, Gordon, Anderson, Nene, Tucker, Onuaku and Qi.

We currently have $69M in cap holds but the only ones that really matter are CP3, Capela and Ariza. They are the only guys that we'd like to keep and that we have Bird Rights on. We don't have Bird Rights on Mbah a Moute and Green so we'd have to use an exception to resign them anyway.

The cap holds for the 3 that I mentioned are $35.35 for CP3, $7M for Capela and $12.87 for Ariza. That's a total of $55.22M in cap holds. We could renounce all other cap holds (Black, Johnson, etc...).

If we did that then our current cap would be $78M in salaries + $55M in cap holds for a total of $133M.

That's well above the projected $101M Cap so we have no cap space to use.

We can clear any or all of those cap holds by renouncing the players rights but if we do that then we would lose their Bird Rights and be forced to resign those players with either cap space or exceptions.

Even if we renounced CP3, Capela and Ariza, it's only gets us to $22M in cap space which isn't enough to resign CP3 or Lebron.

We could also try to trade Anderson and take nothing back but best case that only gets us to $42M in cap space. Still not enough to sign Lebron, CP3 and Capela.

Additionally you could try to trade Gordon for no salary in return but that still only gets us to $55.5M in cap space. That's not enough to sign CP3, LBJ and Capela. Ariza would definitely be gone too and we would have no MLE.

A better/more likely scenario is to trade for Lebron. A trade does a couple of things. It allows you a little extra room since you only have to be within 25% of the salaries in trades, you get to retain the Bird Rights on CP3, Capela and Ariza and you get to retain your MLE.

We still have a couple of issues in a trade scenario. One, if Lebron is leaving then Cleveland isn't going to want to take on big, long term money for anything other than young talent with good upside. Most likely they would go the tank route if Lebron leaves and so they'd be interested in draft picks. Secondly, the salary that we have to send out in any trade has to be within 25% of what we are receiving (i.e. Lebron).

Anderson and Gordon are obviously our biggest trade chips just because they have salaries that we could aggregate to get to the needed amount. Cleveland, of course, would have no interest in absorbing the 2 yr/$42M remaining on Anderson's deal.

Based on that, this is the best hypothetical deal that I could come up with while remaining somewhat realistic. This isn't intended to be an actual proposed deal but rather just a demonstration of the kind of things that Morey could do. By no means am I implying that the other teams in the deal would definitely agree to these moves.

The idea behind this deal is to include a 3rd team so that Anderson's contract stays in the deal and counts for outgoing money from the Rockets but it prevents Cleveland from having to take on his contract.

The other little twist is that I've included additional incoming salary for the Rockets. What?

It's a trick that NBA teams often do when they don't have enough salary to match. The idea is to blow up the total amount of outgoing salary so that the 25% margin that you have covers a larger amount of money. The Rockets did this in their deal to acquire Tracy McGrady.

By including additional incoming salary it allows to more easily match Lebron's salary. The downside of doing this is that we end up taking on more total salary and our luxury tax bill gets even higher. But hey, it's just money and it doesn't effect the salary cap.

For a 3rd team, I picked Chicago. Why? Because they have a ton of cap space ($40M, I believe) and they are early in a rebuild so they won't be signing any high priced FA. Teams are obligated to have a payroll of at least 90% of the cap each season. If you are below that floor then the league ends up charging you the difference anyway. See the idea? You've got to spend a certain amount anyway so if you take on Anderson then you get some additional compensation and he helps you get to the salary floor.

The other reason that I picked Chicago is because they have a salary that they'd like to get rid of so I'm using that as the additional salary that we are taking on. That allows us to increase the total amount of salary and it minimizes the amount of additional salary that Chicago has to absorb. Under this scenario they are taking on the difference in the two salaries rather than the total amount of Anderson's deal.

The additional player that I included in the deal is Christiano Felicio. He's a young undrafted big from Brazil that showed some promise and Chicago ended up giving him a 4 year $32M deal. He averaged under six points in 17 minutes/game this year and that $8M/year salary isn't looking good. The interesting think is that he does have potential and could possibly be a backup big in the Rocket's system. He's just way overpaid at $8M/year.

Here's the deal:

Houston: OUTGOING - Anderson $20,4M, Gordon $13.5M, Onuaku $1.5 (total outgoing : $35.4M) + 2 1st round picks. Feel free to include a 2nd round pick or two if you like.
INCOMING: Lebron $35.6M (opt in) + Felicio $8.47 (total incoming : $44.07)

Cleveland: OUTGOING: - Lebron 435.6M (opt in)
INCOMING: Gordon ($13.5M) + 1st round pick. If you added any 2nd rounders then include some here

Chicago: OUTGOING: Felicio $8.47
INCOMING: Anderson $20.4 + 1st round pick. If you added any 2nd rounders then you may include some here.


Houston gets their guy in Lebron and they still retain their MLE and retain their Bird Rights on Capela, CP3 and Ariza.

Cleveland - If Lebron is leaving, Houston is the only likely destination where Cleveland gets anything in return. LAL or Sixers would sign him for straight cap space. This allows Cleveland to get a frist rounder and they could easily flip Gordon for an additional first or a young player with upside.

Chicago - This is the most questionable one. They are going to have to add salary to reach the floor amount so why not get compensated for it? They further get rid of a bad contract. It's an additional $11.5M/season for the next two years. In 3 years they end up saving $8M since Anderson's deal is a year shorter. Who knows, once he's an expiring, maybe they can even flip Anderson for something in return.

Again, this is just an example of the types of things that Morey could do. To me it seems obvious that a trade is by far the best option. While something like this may be possible, our luxury tax bill would be ugly.

There's certainly other ways to acomplish the same goal. I'm sure BimaThug has his own ideas. He knows the curent CBA very well, he's creative and he puts in a lot more effort than I do.

 

This deal is done under '18-'19 season. Chicago will have $40M in cap space so they don't have to send out any salary at all as they can cover the incoming salary with cap space.

I'm guessing that ESPN Trade Machine is still set to use the current season.

 

Maybe. As I said, it's just an example of what the framework of a deal could look like. Actual teams and players could be very different.

 

This scenario only requires them to take on Gordon who they could easily flip for a draft pick if they wanted. In fact, you could add a 4th team to the deal and send Gordon there and route an additional draft pick back to CLE.

One of the major points of this hypothetical is that CLE has the option to not take on any additional salary. They can end up with 2 firsts if that's what they want. 2 firsts and no additional salary is certainly better than letting him walk for nothing.