Aced It – The Point Forward’s Rob Mahoney gave Houston an A+ for the offseason. The grade comes mainly on the strength of Dwight Howard’s broad shoulders, but the signings of a few of the complimentary guys–Garcia, Casspi, Brooks–also helps Houston’s case.
Several of those players look to be quality rotation contributors, and if the Rockets hit on a few more they could soon have a deep bench of shooters with which to complement Howard’s post-ups and Harden’s pick-and-roll work.
Moreover, with such a group in place, Houston is flexible both on the court and on the books, giving Morey and coach Kevin McHale the freedom to go about maximizing the potential of this roster. Power forward is still a question (second-year player Donatas Motiejunas could end up being the best option to start alongside Howard) and how Houston executes its team defense remains to be seen, but the presence of Howard and Harden alone will open up so much for the Rockets and allow them to compete at a high level.
WARPed – Brad Doolittle’s WARP (Wins Above Replacement Player) projections on ESPN Insider have made it to the center spot. Guess who’s on top?
1. Dwight Howard, Houston Rockets
Projected 2013-14 WARP: 13.2
Howard is coming off his worst season since his rookie year, and ATH has him bouncing back to a level roughly equivalent to his third season. Because of his history of back trouble, you can’t dismiss last year’s dip in rebound rate as a fluke. However, his block rate was higher, so not all the athletic indicators were down. Howard’s foul-drawing rate is always hard to read because of how often he is intentionally fouled, but it was strong last year as well. In his last fully healthy season, Howard put up 20.5 WARP, and that’s the championship-caliber center the Rockets hoped they signed this summer.
A few notes here. First, this projection has Howard as the fourth-best player in the NBA next season behind LeBron, Durant and Chris Paul, which basically jives with the conventional wisdom about the league’s best players right now. Second, Howard’s “fully healthy” WARP would place him solidly at second in the league behind LeBron. Third, WARP doesn’t do much to measure defensive impact, so if Howard can approach Durant’s level of production from a WARP standpoint next year, you could easily argue that the Rockets will have the best non-LeBron player in the league.
Poor Chandler Parsons – Zach Lowe’s latest Grantland column about the Collective Bargaining Agreement features Ricky Ledo in the headline, but revolves around The Hair’s extremely team-friendly contract.
The handsome personage of Chandler Parsons hovered around the Ledo talks and many other second-round negotiations. The Rockets drafted Parsons with the 38th pick in 2011 and signed him to a four-year that guaranteed Houston could keep him with a salary under $1 million in each of those four seasons. It wasn’t the first four-year deal for a second-round pick, but as Parsons emerged into a well-rounded NBA starter, it quickly became the most famous-slash-infamous of such deals. Cap experts and union officials estimate that about a half-dozen second-round picks have received four-year deals in the last half-decade, and Houston helped pioneer the process before Parsons in deals for Chase Budinger, Joey Dorsey, and Jermaine Taylor. (The Spurs also did this with DeJuan Blair, as did the Kings with Hassan Whiteside.)
Those contracts give teams control over cheap second-rounders for an unusually long time.
Lowe also gives some hints on how to read the tea leaves about Parsons’ future this season.
The three-year structure cuts off the contract a year earlier than the Parsons Plan, but it also carries a benefit for teams: players can become restricted free agents after Year 3, but if they play through Year 4 under the terms of their original contracts, they become unrestricted free agents — unfettered in the marketplace, their incumbent teams left without matching rights. This is one reason the Rockets traded Budinger before the fourth season of his Parsons Plan deal; they knew he was headed to unrestricted free agency after Year 4, and decided to flip him for a first-round pick rather than dealing with that.
But here’s the trick: Houston could have made Budinger a restricted free agent after that third season by declining their team option on Budinger’s fourth season, per Daryl Morey, the Houston GM, and several cap experts. But Houston was set to be well under the cap that offseason, and concluded there was more value in picking up Budinger’s $885,000 option and using him as a trade chip. With Houston likely set to be over the cap going forward, look for them to decline Parsons’s fourth-year option and morph Parsons into a restricted free agent next summer. (If they take the opposite route, it may be a sign of their interest in trading Parsons at some point.)
Dissension and Strife – ESPN’s 5-on-5 about centers was a perfect example of why Dwight Howard is an amazing subject for debate. Why? Because two of the three writers chose players other than Dwight Howard (Marc Gasol and Tim Duncan) as the league’s best center while Israel Gutierrez was writing this:
Dwight Howard. There’s almost no arguing this one. In his worst season since he was an NBA infant, Howard still led the league in rebounding and blocked 2.4 shots a game, shot 58 percent and averaged 17 points in a Lakers offense where he was almost an afterthought. And he did it all while dealing with significant back and shoulder issues. If that’s a down year, Houston can expect great things.
Dwight vs. The Field is the new LeBron vs. Kobe debate. For folks who think Dwight is the best, it’s not even close. No other center even sniffs his level of production–just like pre-championship LeBron. But until he is wearing a ring, he will be compared to inferior players on better teams with more playoff wins or championships.
Lin-umentary - Robert Silverman reviews the upcoming “Linsanity” documentary for ESPN.com, and notes that the move to Houston doesn’t make it to the screen.
Of course, the film doesn’t detail what transpired after Linsanity ended. The injuries that cut his season short are omitted entirely as is any unpacking of the circumstances regarding the contract he signed with Houston. It’s understandable, from the filmmaker’s perspective, partly because it takes a long time to complete and edit a feature and partly because it’s a myth, of a sort. Ending the film with a more human, mundane coda is not how one recounts the heroic exploits of legends.
The review of the film is positive. Regardless of the fact that it doesn’t end with “and Jeremy lived happily ever as a Houston Rocket,” I can’t wait to see it.
Your Moment of Zen – Via The Basketball Jones, here’s Dwight Howard dancing with your grandma.
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