bowiac said:
I think this line of thinking is mistaken, precisely because of what Lowe said. The truly great cap guys is where the league is short, and the Rockets are one of the few teams that have them. That's why it's totally reasonable to expect that the rest of the league is still behind the curve in this respect.
You can't be turning down "profitable" opportunities because someone can theoretically screw you. You need to consider the likelihood of that happening. There's a risk/reward analysis you need to go through. The risk here was:
1. Parsons gets offered a max deal.
2. The team that makes him that offer has an interest in screwing Houston. (Obviously everyone wants to screw everyone, but this isn't "free" - Dallas locked up max cap room for three days without know if they'd end up with Parsons).
3. The team that makes him that offer is smart enough to design a contract that screws Houston.
4. The team that makes him that offer is willing to themselves take on a contract that is untradeable. (This is a big one - Dallas is stuck with Parsons themselves now).
5. The Rockets strike out on Melo.
6. The Rockets strike out on Bosh or any other max guy who is around.
All six of those things need to happen here. I don't know what the ex ante likelihood of that chain of events was, but I don't think was especially high.
That's the risk. What's the downside? You miss out on one cheap year of Chandler Parsons. I think that's well worth it, even if it didn't work. Maybe it was blindingly obvious to you in retrospect, but fact that nobody other than the Rockets had shown a interest/willingness/capability to play RFA cap games is pretty salient to me n this regard.
You say it's totally obvious and foreseeable - most things are after the fact I guess. Kudos to you, you're smarter than me or the Rockets front office/ownership.
You seem to think I've suggested they shouldn't have made the moves they did because of the risk of it not working---to be really clear, that is not what I suggested or how I would expect a sophisticated organization to think about the problem. I think the Rockets likely did the right analysis, and reached what I suspect was the right decision for them even though it didn't work out. But I'm just guessing, and as noted the before the sub-optimal outcome does leave open a real possibility they blew the analysis.
There's a whole bunch of interrelated factors involved in determining ahead of time what might happen and how you should manage it, and they don't net out in a purely linear way; it's a dynamic market and thus one has to model scenarios, with inherent uncertainty. This is how economists and business strategists handle these problems every day, and I suspect how the best front offices in sports do so as well. That's scenario planning. I don't think any senior decision maker in a competitive league like the NBA should (or, I suspect does) assume that the rest of the league are far behind the curve, either---that's a prescription for trouble. So on that one part of the assessment, if they thought of it like you suggest above they made a significant mistake (which happens to be what we saw actually play out)
To elaborate a little on how I suspect this goes, a team likely goes through a rigorous process to evaluate what other teams might do (with a couple permutations, since they of course can't be sure how other teams will act) and how the market might evolve based on those things happening. This includes who might bid, how might they bid, how might Parsons respond, how can we influence those three factors, how would external events (such as Lebron opting out) impact the above, etc. All of this together should be used to help the team evaluate the risks and rewards available from different paths (exercise Parsons' option, negotiate an extension, etc.) to arrive at a preferred path and an understanding of alternate paths. So it's the sum of a whole bunch of different scenarios that gets you to the decision in my mind, not just the probability of a particular path occurring.
If they did this, and I suspect they probably did or something like it, they'd have recognized the risk that another team (and off top of my head Dallas is one of a small set who one could have imagined might) would offer a max deal, and would structure it in a way to complicate matching. It's not a 100% probability, and you'd have to decide whether to measure risk quantitatively or qualitatively...but either way, you figure in the uncertainty of what others do, and consider that in your process. You'd also have at least scenario-planned whether teams might do other things that did not occur---offer a huge one-year deal, etc. This all sits beneath determining the 'risk' as you simplify it, and is part of reaching a decision about what to do.
To net that all out, if the Rockets didn't see someone trying what Dallas did then to me there is a very significant question about how good a cap guy they have. That noted, I suspect they do have strength there, and thus did anticipate this scenario. As stated earlier, I also think a good analysis that evaluates all these scenarios (the one that actually occurred and many others that did not) can determine that in spite of this risk the Parsons/Bosh plan was the right one, and as I said initially this feels to me like a reasonable assessment. But just to be clear: if the explanation someone from the team gives is 'we didn't see this move coming' as you suggested previously, then Morey needs to add some capability to the team because they underprepared.
