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By: rahat huq
I went to bed last night, as I typically do, around 11:30 central standard time. I knew I'd awaken to the news that Chandler Parsons had signed the offer sheet extended to him by the Dallas Mavericks yesterday afternoon. Instead, I was rudely greeted by this pic of Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, with Parsons, retweeted by just about everyone I knew:
Good Thursday morning, everyone. (Now hit the snooze button. Again. And again.) RT @clutchfans: Ugh. pic.twitter.com/xT6EwvODiY
— Adam Clanton (@adamclanton) July 10, 2014
Ugh.
The first time I saw Chandler Parsons, I was ironically staked out in front of Marcus Morris' locker along with four or five other reporters. It was the first game of the young forward's career and I had several questions about the transition to small forward. I thought Morris was going to be an absolute stud. Parsons came by, already dressed, tossed some stuff into his locker, cracked a joke, and took off. (The "scrubs" on a professional basketball team depart the fastest after games because they know no one is waiting to talk to them). Now the guy is earning max-level NBA dollars. Amazing.
There are several issues here surrounding this story which need to be addressed. First, I'll cut to the point, to the question all of you have been asking me: does this prohibit Houston from signing Chris Bosh or signing both Bosh and Parsons? The simple answer is 'no.' The basic mechanics remain the same. The team can sign Bosh and then, irrespective of the unexpected size of this offer, retain Parsons by matching the Mavericks' offer sheet and exceeding the cap through Chandler's bird rights.
Things get much, much dicier from there.
There's no use delving into the numbers here in this limited space because there are so many different permutations of how things could play out, with so many unsettled variables, each with significant consequences of their own. For one, the final construction of the Asik trade still is not clear. New Orleans simply cannot absorb the Turkish center into space, but sending back a salary match would be prohibitive in the Rockets' goals; a traded-player-exception is likely going to be generated in that Pelicans deal. The final details on the 76ers' Jeremy Lin deal which may or may not have been already been agreed upon (sorry again for premature tweet last night, you guys) also are unknown. Then there's Bosh who can either be signed outright into space (which would necessitate stripping the cupboard bare), or acquired via sign&trade, a maneuver which would allow the team to remain above the cap and retain its exceptions, but would be dependent on the mechanics of the Asik trade, but with the status of the midlevel dependent upon "apron" concerns which have been complicated by the size of this offer....
*takes breath*
You can see why it's better to just wait at least to see how the Asik and Lin trades play out. But yes, the Rockets can sign Bosh and retain Parsons.
Would they do that? I think it's almost a guarantee that if they got Bosh, Houston would match on Parsons. Scratch that - I don't know. If they have an avenue to get a cheaper replacement, they might consider that route. But I feel strongly that Houston would match on Parsons. I'm not even sure getting Bosh alone is worth it without having Parsons along with him in the lineup.
If they don't get Bosh? Things get dicier. I think that in the event Houston strikes out on Bosh, they let Chandler walk. They won't blow the precious cap space they've been culturing on retaining Parsons. I suppose they could try to sign Luol Deng to a massive one or two year deal to preserve the "space" as a placeholder, and then re-sign Parsons, but that would require some gymnastics. The bottom line is that striking out on all of the big names and then losing Parsons ontop of it (or hell, even just keeping him on a bad deal) would represent Houston's absolute worst-case scenario coming into this offseason. As I tweeted yesterday afternoon, Houston is very close to realizing their absolute worst case scenario.
Bosh or not, the team could match on Parsons and then look to trade him down the line. But is that $15million contract tradable? Hell if I know that, at this point. I didn't even think Parsons was worth $10million per annum (a topic regarding which I wrote a near dissertation, spanning the past two years, and about five blog posts)...
Why did Parsons move so quickly on this deal? In other words, "Et tu, Chandler?" I need to clarify my thoughts here from yesterday as a 140 character limit isn't....uhhh....you know, sufficient for nuanced opinions and some of you got the wrong idea. As you know, Houston now has three days to match, or, in essence, three days to sign Chris Bosh, or all hell breaks loose and I shut down the blog. Couldn't he have waited? Shouldn't he have waited, if not just to give the Rockets time to work things out with Bosh? Some of you took umbrage at my insinuation that this development was disappointing, stating Parsons owed Houston nothing and was merely "an asset" in their grand plan. Realize that Houston let Parsons out of his contract a year early, allowing him to test the market and extract this payday. They didn't have to do that. With that being said--as many of you pointed out and as I did not have the characters left to enunciate--that act was not purely borne from altruism on the part of Houston, as nothing is in the world of hardline economics. The Rockets stood to gain because they could then control their own fate regarding Parsons, rather than letting the market dictate his destination. (They probably just grossly estimated their chances in free agency at landing one of the big stars). In summary, I was simply saying that it would have been kind of nice if Chandler could have simply held off a bit longer rather than just jumping at the crack of midnight to ink his signature. That observation is not exclusive to the nuances of this ordeal: both sides had their own agendas.
There also is the very likely possibility that Dallas, knowing Houston was in a bind, required this deal get done sooner than later. There also is the reality that you don't walk away from someone offering you a bag filled with 46 million $1 bills.
Now the race is on. Houston has to sign Chris Bosh before the three day window expires meaning essentially that Houston's fate, the ultimate destiny of The Morey Project, lies in the hands of Lebron James. Ugh. I feel somewhat comforted by a report, well, I guess "theory", surfacing yesterday evening that James was cognizant of Bosh's circumstances and would not delay his decision unnecessarily in mindfulness of that. Then I remembered that this is the same guy that crushed the hearts of an entire city on national television and I went back into depression. Gun to my head prediction? I think we hear something on Bosh by tomorrow. There's no way this thing drags out longer, is there? Several readers mentioned yesterday that if there truly was a strong possibility of James returning to the Heat, would Bosh really have progressed so far into talks with Houston? I don't know at this point.
A last note on Parsons: I wrote last year, at length, that in a vacuum, Parsons wasn't even worth $10 million per annum. He doesn't defend, is a streaky shooter, and doesn't have the handles nor athleticism to create his own shot. He's essentially a glorified roleplayer. Having said that, on this team, especially with Bosh in tow, for synergistic value alone, Parsons is worth at the least $10 million. Is he worth $15 million? While he might not be, if they land Bosh, the impact of his absence makes it the case that you almost have to keep him. Those are the realities of team-building in the modern NBA.
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