Report: High asking price, refusal to opt-in scuttled Dwight deals
The Houston Rockets’ efforts to move Dwight Howard figured to be one of the more fascinating storylines of Thursday’s NBA trade deadline. Would Rockets general manager Daryl Morey be able to find an offer enticing enough for Howard — still a very good center who’s damn good in the playoffs, but now on the wrong side of 30 with a scary injury history and without the elite athleticism he once possessed — to make moving him palatable?
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As we learned Thursday, the answer was no. “The Rockets did what they could to move Howard out of Houston on Thursday,” NBA sources told Chris Mannix of The Vertical, “canvassing the league for offers, plainly instructing teams to submit their best bids. No luck.” And, as expected, it was the combination of Howard’s downshift from franchise-changing talent to very good big man and his ability to opt out of the final year of his contract this summer to enter unrestricted free agency that seems to have put the kibosh on any dealing.
According to ESPN.com’s Marc Stein, while Morey’s high asking price in a Howard deal — “at least one frontline player and a future first-round draft pick in return” — contributed to the stasis, it was Dwight’s commitment to testing the market this summer that finished the job:
“Many teams called expressing great interest in trading for Dwight,” Howard’s agent, Dan Fegan, told ESPN.com on Thursday night. “The obvious stumbling block to a trade was how could a team justify giving up important assets for a player who was about to become a free agent in a few short months?
“Not surprisingly, as the deadline approached, several teams called stating they had worked out the trade parameters with Houston for a Dwight deal but were not prepared to give up their assets unless Dwight agreed to opt into the last year of his contract and forego free agency. Dwight declined.” […]
Fegan refused to discuss specific teams that made pitches for Howard, but sources told ESPN.com that the [Milwaukee] Bucks were one of those teams.
The Bucks and Rockets did exchange some trade proposals, sources said, but Milwaukee made it clear that it wouldn’t go through with any deal for Howard unless he opted into the final season of his contract, which is scheduled to pay him $23.3 million in 2016-17.
If we take Fegan’s statement at face value, that’s an entirely reasonable tack for Howard to take. He negotiated that opt-out clause into his contract with the Rockets for a reason, after all, and lest we forget, things didn’t work out super great the last time Dwight decided to stick around for the final year of a deal that had started to sour.
Besides, while $23.3 million’s a hell of a paycheck for a year’s work, opting out affords Howard the opportunity to sign a new deal in free agency this summer, when the salary cap’s set to explode to an estimated $92 million thanks to the influx of revenue from the league’s new $24 billion broadcast rights deal.
As a player with more than 10 years of NBA service time, Howard’s eligible for the largest possible maximum contract — one that pays him 35 percent of the salary cap. (Well, kind of. As Larry Coon explains in his indispensable NBA Salary Cap FAQ, it’s really 35 percent of a slightly lower number based on a slightly lower share of the league’s projected basketball-related income.) Based on current cap estimates, the starting max-deal salary for a 10-year vet next year will top $30 million, meaning that even if all Howard did was tear up his existing contract and re-up with whichever team had traded for him — thus retaining his Bird rights and the 7.5 percent first-year raise that only that incumbent team could offer — he’d be in for a monster pay raise:
| 2016-17 Year 1 max for 10+ years of service time | $30,328,744 |
| 7.5% raise | $2,274,656 |
| Year 2 (Year 1 + raise) | $32,603,400 |
| Year 3 (Year 2 + raise) | $34,878,056 |
| Year 4 (Year 3 + raise) | $37,152,711 |
| Year 5 (Year 4 + raise) | $39,427,367 |
| Total new contract value | $174,390,278 |
If Howard decides to leave his current team and join a new one, he loses out on the fifth year and can only receive a 4.5 percent raise, but still puts himself in line for a really big bump:
| 2016-17 Year 1 max for 10+ years of service time | $30,328,744 |
| 4.5% raise | $1,364,793 |
| Year 2 (Year 1 + raise) | $31,693,537 |
| Year 3 (Year 2 + raise) | $34,423,124 |
| Year 4 (Year 3 + raise) | $34,423,124 |
| Total new contract value | $129,503,737 |
And even if you’re of the opinion that nobody’s going to offer a full-length full max contract carrying Howard through his mid-30s — and as Mannix reported earlier this month, multiple league executives share that opinion — the sheer number of teams that are going to have tons of money to spend this summer and the relative paucity of top-end talent on which to spend it suggests that even this version of Dwight’s got a really good chance of getting a multi-year deal that outstrips what he was already in line to make.
Given Howard’s injury history over the years, retaining the right to re-enter the market at 30 rather than 31 so he can pursue a longer-term deal sooner rather than later seems like a pretty smart play. You can’t blame the reported suitors for wanting more cost certainty and walking away when they couldn’t get it, of course. But with none of the callers on Stein’s list figuring to profile as a title contender after adding Howard — with the possible exception of the Boston Celtics, who weren’t willing to pay Morey’s asking price, according to The Vertical’s Adrian Wojnarowski — it also seems hard to blame Howard for preferring to stay put, even if this “broken” Rockets club sure seems to be going nowhere fast.
All that understandable behavior leaves Morey in something of a tight spot. The Rockets come out of the deadline at 27-28, in eighth place in the Western Conference, and looking like their best-case scenario is to try to give a heavy favorite a scare in the opening round … provided, of course, Howard and James Harden, whose relationship has reportedly never been particularly good and has evidently become even more fractured of late, can lead the kind of charge just about everybody has been waiting all season long for Houston to make.
“This year, we still feel very good about our roster,” Morey said during his appearance Thursday on The Vertical’s Trade Deadline Show. “We’re not feeling good about how we’re playing, but we feel good about our roster — it’s the group that made the Western Conference finals last year.”
And, come what may, it’s the group that’s going to finish this Rockets season.
“James and Dwight together have made the Western Conference finals, have won more than two-thirds of their games,” Morey said. “This is a group that we would be very reluctant to split up. Obviously there was a lot of interest in [Howard] — I think there was a lot of noise about that — but that was something we were going to be very reluctant to break up. As part of my job, I do have to listen to everything, but nothing got close and we weren’t going to split that up unless it was something significant.”
On Thursday, the combination of Morey’s demands and Howard’s contract status kept anything that significant from coming Houston’s way. Come July, though, there won’t be anything to stand in the way of the split but Morey’s ability to get everybody on the same page after a disappointing season and chart a more harmonious and successful course for the future around the Harden-Howard combo … if that’s even possible. It ought to be fascinating to see what, if anything, he’s got up his sleeve.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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