Salman's grades: Rockets acquire Steven Adams

Houston doubles down on their financial plan

The deal:

The grade:

B

The reasoning:

As a reminder, the Houston Rockets first acquired Victor Oladipo’s $9.5 million expiring salary in a trade with the Oklahoma City Thunder for Kevin Porter and two second round picks. Through these two deals, the Rockets essentially traded five second round picks for Steven Adams. I’d imagine many are wondering why Houston would trade for a player that’s out for the year with a season-ending knee injury. Well, their reasoning is two-fold:

1. Finances.

   It’s become clear now that Houston has always planned to be over the salary cap this summer. Being an over-the-cap team gives them a few new tools at their disposal, namely the full mid-level exception ($13 million). They can use the full-MLE along with the bi-annual exception ($4.7 million) to add some nice role players in free agency.

   One might ask, “Why didn’t they just waive KPJ and use cap space to sign a good role player instead?” Well, there are two reasons:

   First, trading Porter allows Houston to have two solid role players (Adams and MLE Player X) instead of one (MLE Player X). More good players is always a preference over less good players if you can reasonably pull it off.

   Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, between Adams ($12.6 million), Jeff Green ($9.6 million), Jock Landale ($8 million), and Jae’Sean Tate ($7 million), Houston now has $37.2 million in salary that they can aggregate in trades without touching any of their core six prospects. When you include those prospects and the Nets draft capital they still have in their back pocket, the Rockets have a ton of flexibility to construct packages for a star player should one become available.

2. The Rockets were reportedly seeking a defensive-minded center at the deadline to backup Alperen Şengün. While Adams is out for the season, he’ll give Houston exactly what they’re looking for next season.

So we know why Houston made this trade. We can now ask, “Is their reasoning sound? Was this worth it?”

Conceptually, I get it. The Rockets had a plan in mind when they gave Kevin Porter his extension. In addition to giving the organization a black eye, Porter’s deplorable actions put those plans in jeopardy. This is the end result of Rafael Stone’s front office scrambling to salvage their plans.

It’s true that second round picks are often scratch-off tickets. However, those scratch off tickets have about a 1 in 5 chance of hitting on real talent. And Houston has a better hit-rate than most teams in the 2nd round.

It’s possible that Houston has finished most of their 2024 scouting and deemed they have no interest in selecting a 2nd round talent this year. It still doesn’t seem like the Rockets managed their assets that wisely here. Five second rounders for backup center that’ll be expiring next season? That seems a bit rich.

There’s little incentive for Houston to move Adams again, so we’ll just have to see if these transactions end up foreshadowing an even bigger move by the organization in the next twelve months.

In the meantime, we’re still six days until the NBA trade deadline. I would suspect the Rockets have more moves up their sleeve before calling it quits on Thursday.