Howard deal one option to awaken fading team
Nearly two hours after the Rockets headed to the All-Star break and subsequent trade deadline with another bounce on rock bottom, general manager Daryl Morey and coach J.B. Bickerstaff finally left the visitors locker room in Portland on Wednesday night to pick up the pieces.
Bickerstaff has called the Rockets “a broken team.” No one suggested he was wrong. He and Morey met with stars Dwight
Howard and James Harden long after the locker room had otherwise emptied.
Morey would not comment about the discussions. Howard said only, “We’ll be fine. The first half is over with.”
But less than 12 hours later, Yahoo Sports reported the Rockets have engaged teams in trade talks about Howard, an eight-time All-Star who is less than three seasons removed from coming to Houston as the league’s most-coveted free agent.
Howard is expected to opt out of his contract after the season to become a free agent. To trade him, the Rockets would have to take back a little more than $ 17 million in contracts (unless they send him to a team with cap room) and would have to find a team willing to gamble that it could keep him as a free agent. They also would have to make a dramatic reversal in their plans to keep Howard with Harden and build around them.
Outside looking in
But plans could be changing as dramatically as the Rockets’ status as presumed contenders to a team currently in position to be in the draft lottery as the ninth seed in the Western Conference at 27-28.
The Rockets’ hopes to start the season have been reduced to irrelevant fantasies, replaced by the wreckage of disappointment and dysfunction.
“We’re broken,” Bickerstaff said of his unusually long postgame session with his team following the latest disheartening loss, 116-103 to the Trail Blazers. “Right now, we’re a broken team. We can’t continue to go out and play this way.
“It’s easy to see. It’s a fragmented bunch. You can’t win that way. It’s just not on the same page. We say we’ll do whatever it takes to win. You got to walk that walk. If you want to do that, you have to go out and do it. Right now, we’ve got guys that believe they’re competing and trying to get after it, but the train’s not moving in the same direction. We have to fix it.”
A team that had been so invested in a win-now mentality it fired Kevin McHale just 11 games into the season, the Rockets have a losing record and a place among the lottery teams, with Morey now on the clock to find reinforcements — or to start over.
The Rockets could seek a deal for help that would work with the combination of Howard and Harden. Phoenix’s Markieff Morris and New Orleans’ Ryan Anderson have long been considered players likely to move and would fit well with the Rockets. But there is little reason to think smaller moves would close the enormous gulf between where the Rockets expected to be and where they find themselves at the All-Star break.
Instead, if the Rockets are seriously looking for options to deal Howard, they could be signalling they are ready for a more massive rebuild or at least are no longer confident they could keep him as a free agent.
“Where we’re at shifts how much you focus on the now versus the future,” Morey said. “It doesn’t make you exclusively look at one versus the other.
“You have to take a realistic look at where your team is at and address what needs to be addressed. You have to look at everything. We’ll look for things that will upgrade us now. We’ll look for things that help down the road. If you’re too dogmatic that we’re going to do X or Y, I think you miss out on opportunities.”
It starts with defense
Morey won’t have to spend much time assessing the damage. He said he was very surprised with the Rockets’ season-long struggles and had little difficulty pointing to their cause.
“Obviously, defensively we’re nowhere near where we need to be,” he said. “It starts there. We have a lot of other problems, too.”
That includes chemistry that has become so wrecked the Rockets played in Portland as if they were strangers, or worse.
Guard Jason Terry had declared the Rockets’ chemistry to be “horrible” as he cut through the media room after the game. He later said he had seen worse, but that might be only because the 17-year veteran has been around for so long, long enough to know what usually comes next.
“Do we like to play with each other? That’s as simple as I can get it,” Terry said. “If you can’t get five guys on the court at one time to function as a unit, you’re not going to have success.
“If you’re watching the game … it’s just not functioning like a unit. When that happens, only one of two things can happen. We’re either going to make changes or we’re going to stick with what we’ve got and ride this thing out. I’m an optimist. I believe in this group. I know we can get it done because we’ve done it before. We know what happens. You make changes.”
That won’t be easy. The Rockets have glaring needs. Their defense has regressed to one of the league’s worst. They have been so futile at filling the void at power forward, with Terrence Jones struggling and Donatas Motiejunas still trying to come back from last season’s back surgery, that they have stopped playing power forwards for all but brief stretches. Point guard Ty Lawson, the presumed final piece, has little role at all. Forward Josh Smith has not played in the sec- ond half of the past three games.
The Rockets are just $524,000 from moving so far over the salary cap that they would be subject to a hard cap. That would require that they precisely match salary in any trade, making any maneuvers tricky now and even more difficult if they reach that level. They could move contracts first to give themselves wiggle room, but that would require even more trade deadline juggling and would only work if they had the subsequent deals lined up.
Unless they are in the lottery, the Rockets owe Denver their first-round pick next season, which will not only stop them from offering a first-round pick this season but also next season because NBA rules prohibit teams from owing first-round picks in consecutive seasons.
Lacking quality bait
Their top trade assets — other than the nucleus of Harden, Howard and Trevor Ariza — are their young players in their rookie deals. Building deals around Jones, Motiejunas or Clint Capela is not likely to fetch much.
“This period is one of the opportunities that a team can be upgraded,” Morey said of the Feb. 18 trade deadline. “You can’t force it, but there are not too many windows that you can improve your team. We’ll try to take advantage if we can. It won’t be from a lack of effort if we don’t.
“For sure we can repair everything from within. We haven’t had any track record of doing that. We have to prove we can do that. But for sure we have a group we know has played at a high level. Obviously, that’s now a decent amount in the past. But in sports you can always turn things around.”
With little reason to expect that, Morey left Portland and went to work. The loss likely did not change anything, but it brought issues into clear focus. If Morey was ready to consider almost anything, he had been given ample reason.
“We have to figure out where we are and where we’re going and how to get there,” Bickerstaff said before the Rockets lost for the fourth time in six games, another comeback (this time from 21 points down to within five) falling too short to change anything.
“It’s always good to have dreams and goals, but the most important thing is to come up with a plan, a realistic plan to help you get there.”