When Houston made its recent trade for veteran center Steven Adams, one of the obvious implications was that it was made with future years in mind. Adams is unavailable to play this season, but he’s under contract for 2024-25 at $12.6 million and is expected to return healthy and serve as a strong backup to Alperen Sengun.
As part of that deal, once Houston exchanged the expiring contract of Victor Oladipo for a multi-year contract in Adams, it became clear that the Rockets were not looking to maximize financial space beneath the NBA’s salary cap during the 2024 offseason.
In theory, Houston could have opened up a moderate amount of room by allowing Oladipo to expire and not picking up the options on player contracts such as Jae’Sean Tate, Jeff Green, and Jock Landale.
However, the small financial gap between that space (~$15.8 million) and the NBA’s non-taxpayer mid-level exception (~$12.9 million starting salary) probably wouldn’t have been worth losing access to Houston’s bi-annual exception (~$4.7 million), its Kevin Porter Jr. trade exception ($4.5 million), and the ability to use expiring contracts such as Tate, Green, and Landale to match salary in trades.
(To go under the cap, Houston would need to to renounce those salary cap exceptions and turn down some or all of those contracts. They also would have needed to offload their incoming first-round draft pick from Brooklyn, which could land in the top-10 selections.)
…Instead, *barring trades*, expect them to keep (most of) Uncle Jeff, Landale, Tate, their draft picks, their NT-MLE ($12.9M), their BAE ($4.7M) & their KPJ TPE ($4.5M). That's a much better use of assets.
— David Weiner #🟦 (@BimaThug) February 9, 2024
With that in mind, as part of last Monday’s press conference to wrap up the 2024 trade deadline, general manager Rafael Stone was asked whether the Adams deal makes it likely that Houston will operate above the salary cap in the upcoming offseason. He responded:
Yeah, it does. There still are scenarios where we could dip down, but I think very, very likely we will be above the cap.
Complete video of Stone’s press conference is available below.
Together, Adams, Uncle Jeff, Landale & Tate will be $37.3M of expiring/NG'teed salary the #Rockets can use to take back $46.8M or more of incoming salary without even having to include a core piece.
— David Weiner #🟦 (@BimaThug) February 9, 2024
