Red94 | essays and musings on the nba and houston rockets

Via the Chronicle:

The way things are going we might never get a chance to find out, but the Rockets’ sign-and-trade deal would not send three veterans to the Raptors. They have the framework of a deal in place that would include two veterans, likely out of Luis Scola, Trevor Ariza and Shane Battier.

There was a report that the deal would include all three, but Ariza and Battier are due $13.7 million next season. Unless another player in addition to Bosh headed to Houston (and I’m told that is not the case) there would not be enough money in the deal for Scola to take a sign-and-trade offer. He can do better than that.

He could, however, get a rich offer from the Raptors and head that way with one Rockets veteran. It would not be two others.

I don’t think this is correct.  Assuming that Scola receives an offer around my estimate of his market value (at least $6million), because the raise would be greater than 20%, he would become a BYC player and only 50% of his new first year salary would count in trade calculations.  Given that the Rockets would only need to come within 125%+$100,000 of Bosh’s max salary, the numbers on Ariza+Scola+Battier for Bosh should work.

I checked if BYC did not come into effect for S&T deals, but they do, according to Coon:

One complication with sign-and-trade deals is that the signed player can immediately become a BYC player (see question number 75 for more information on BYC), so the player’s BYC value must be used when determining whether the trade is allowed.

So unless my understanding of the rules is incorrect, I don’t think Feigen’s basis for refuting the Y! report is accurate.

However, the greater point though is that he clearly has a source that is informing him that only 2 of the 3 players would be included – that’s all that’s important for our speculative purposes, not his basis, even if inaccurate.

In my opinion, contrary to popular sentiment, including either Scola or Ariza in a deal is good news because the inclusion of that value would most likely allow the team to preserve more coveted assets (ie: the Knicks picks) for later deals.  Ariza should be easily replaceable and Scola won’t hold much value to a lot of teams.

From stephena.com:

All along, Pat Riley’s plan as President of the Heat was to convince Wade to take a paycut and offer all three (Wade, LeBron and Bosh) deals averaging approximately $15.7 mil….with opt-outs after three years. But since Bosh wants the max at all cost (and he’s trying to get it in a sign-and-trade deal with Houston), it changed the game for everyone. Especially Miami and New York.

Not exactly the most credible of sources but at the same time, we can at least take comfort in knowing that this isn’t a leak – if Henry Thomas wanted to use the media, he’d pass it along to some of the bigger names with Y! and ESPN.

For now, we can speculate.  If the report is true, it affirms Morey’s prescience – Bosh won’t go without a S&T.  My fear though is the Bulls putting together a package to ship Deng elsewhere, sending the return to Toronto for a Bosh S&T.