Triple Option

By Michael Maynard

Published 6/18/19, 10:00 PM CT

The big NBA headline of the day is the speculated tension in Houston between James Harden and Chris Paul.

However there also appear to be questions with the legitimacy of Goodwill’s report, and CP3 sort of confirmed this report was false or misleading.

For the story’s sake and considering Paul and Harden probably don’t fit well from a basketball sense, I’m gonna act as if there are legit rumors and CP3 wants out of Houston.

Paul enters into the second year of a 4yr/$160 million contract signed last offseason. He has been derailed by injuries in his time in Houston and is clearly past his prime. Which begs the question of why Daryl Morey and the Rockets decided to bring back Paul in the first place, knowing an aging point guard would take up more than a third of their cap space.

A $40 million cap hit is going to be incredibly tough to sell, and there’s very few teams that have the flexibility to do so, or would want to. In addition, most teams already have a point guard. Of those who stand out, the Suns are probably taking Darius Garland in the draft. The Magic have Markelle Fultz, and are content to keep using DJ Augustin in the interim. The Lakers can barely afford another max player like Kemba or Kyrie, and Paul would be $10 million more. Charlotte would likely have to go into the luxury tax to retain Kemba, so unless they could unload Nicolas Batum and Bismack Biyombo, Paul is too much a financial burden.

Which essentially leaves the Bulls. I still don’t truly buy into the fact that we need a point guard, but I do understand there are questions as Kris Dunn enters a contract year with not much appeal. I still stand by Dunn, and that’s actually part of the reason I support this trade.

I am officially out on tanking. Obviously Adam Silver and the league learned that it was a problem in The Process, so they changed the Draft Lottery setup to be more random. Nobody expected the results to have as much parity as they did with New Orleans and the Lakers jumping into the Top 4. Philly hit on Embiid and Simmons but also missed on Okafor, Noel, Carter-Williams, and Fultz. With Markkanen, Carter, and Hutchison and then three more first-round picks, say we have a little better luck and three of those hit. Bulls fans can’t buy into three more years of tanking for the seventh overall pick. As it is, they wasted two years of development for Dunn, LaVine, and Markkanen by holding them out. Especially Dunn.

So I ask Bulls fans, is this team competitive? Say we draft Coby White, everyone stays healthy, LaVine becomes an all-star, Wendell Carter shows he’s been in the weight room, Lauri becomes more consistent, Otto Porter scores 18 points per game, Dunn is steady at the point and if not Coby White flashes potential. Do they make the playoffs? Toronto, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Indiana, Brooklyn are all probably in. Boston is weirdly falling apart with Kyrie ghosting them and Horford opting out, but they still probably have enough to sneak in. Say the Knicks make a free agency splash and make it as well. Can the Bulls be the 8th best team? I’m not sure i buy it next year. Best case scenario i think they go .500, if literally all the conditions i stated go to plan. But one of Orlando, Detroit, or Atlanta are probably better, so they miss the playoffs.

My point here is that it doesn’t do the Bulls any good to stand pat like they did last year. The Bulls aren’t getting a max-level free agent unless they want to clear enough cap space to make an offer to D’Angelo Russell, which may or may not be worth pursing, and who knows if he takes that offer. It’s also worth mentioning that next year’s free agency class is incredibly underwhelming. That best explains why the front office traded for Otto Porter Jr., knowing it would be more worth it to take a flyer and hope he becomes a piece than invest that money into someone from that class. Even if KD opts in with Golden State for the year and becomes a free agent in 2020, he’s not coming to Chicago.

Like Kris Dunn or not, the Bulls do need a point guard for depth sake. That would theoretically be how they invest their cap space this year. Currently Basketball-Reference has the Bulls total at $81 million. The seventh overall pick signing brings that up to about $86 million. The NBA cap total is $109 million, so the Bulls have give or take $22 million to spend based on their current roster.

A veteran point guard like Patrick Beverley, Ricky Rubio, or what the hell DRose would probably cost in the range of $10-15 million. There’s also Malcolm Brogdon who is a RFA, so the Bucks can match any offer. Anything the Bulls would offer that Milwaukee wouldn’t match would probably take up the majority of this cap space. I also don’t love the idea of investing a good chunk of cap space into Malcolm Brogdon. No offense to him, he’s a good player and former Rookie of the Year who will have a successful and long NBA career, but he’s not someone I would build around, and he also fits perfectly in Milwaukee. Any other roster additions would essentially be to fill out roster spots.

Or they could trade for Chris Paul, who while aging still might be better than those three guys. Ideally he could serve as a mentor for the younger guys. There’s really no big superstar personalities like there have been in LA and Houston. Zach LaVine seems to be the leader of this current group, and I’d like to think he’d give way to the Future Hall of Famer.

At the very least, Paul is one of the best playmakers in NBA history. Zach LaVine is more of a pure scorer than a playmaker, so he benefits from working off the ball. I don’t love the idea of having two big guys in the modern NBA with Markkanen and Carter, but if both continue to round out their skills, this should enable Paul to facilitate for Markkanen on the perimeter and Carter inside. More or less I think the basketball problems in Houston stemmed from the fact that CP3 and Harden are both point guards in that offense, aka they both are ball-handlers for the pick-and-roll. There’s the point guard, the roller (Clint Capela), and three wings who stand around and spot up. So when Harden was running the offense, Paul was forced to stand around as a shooter, which is not his best fit. On the flip side, when Paul ran the offense, Harden didn’t want to stand around because the Rockets have worked best when he has the ball.

I’m also willing to take the chance that Paul and Dunn can combine so one of which is at full health. Depending how Dunn develops, it might do him well to not be the starting point guard all the time. Plus if they were to sign a veteran point guard the plan would probably be to bring Dunn off the bench, which he may not like in a contract year. At least in this system, the Bulls don’t seem like they’ve given up completely on Dunn. And it’s not like Dunn hasn’t showed flashes of being good. He’s had three head coaches in three years, much of which he hasn’t been playing because the Bulls have been overly cautious about injuries, aka sitting him to lose games. And if this situation doesn’t work off and Dunn has a bad year, then the Bulls let him walk or trade him at the deadline. In this case I lose and have to address the issue, but maybe a change of scenery isn’t the worst thing for his career.

So here’s my plan for how the Bulls go about acquiring Chris Paul:

Bulls Receive: Chris Paul, 2020 First Round Pick, 2021 First Round Pick, 2022 First Round Pick, 2023 First Round Pick, 2024 First Round Pick (all picks with stipulations, get to in a second)

Rockets Receive: Otto Porter Jr., Cristiano Felicio

I didn’t mention Porter as a part of next year because I had him as the primary piece in this trade. Porter makes approximately $27 million per year for two more years. Paul makes $40 million per year for three more years, hence the draft picks go way to Chicago, as they take on the worse contract. Now I actually think Porter is favorable amongst Bulls fans who followed the team in the second half of the season. At least he is more favorable around the league now than he was in Washington, where he had pretty much bottomed out.

My point here is that this might be the best value Porter will have with the Bulls. I’d say there is a very slim chance that Porter becomes an all-star caliber player, which was good enough for the Bulls to take a chance on him in the Jabari Parker trade, as they have to get to the cap minimum somehow. But if he doesn’t become an all-star level player, he is in the way of Chandler Hutchison or if they take a wing (Jarrett Culver) in the 2019 Draft. If he’s somewhere in the middle, the Bulls are probably better off developing the young guys.

However, this trade probably benefits Porter because he fits well with Houston. He replaced Trevor Ariza in Washington, and he could fill the void Trevor Ariza left last offseason in Houston as a 3-and-D wing. Alongside Harden and Capela, and then Eric Gordon and PJ Tucker on the wings, Porter is probably an upgrade over Danuel House, or at least creates more depth with House off the bench. And back to the point of how Paul doesn’t fit well in Houston anyway, Porter is much more useful to Houston than Paul.

Felicio might be waived by the Bulls to clear up cap space, but in this case his $8 million somewhat balances the cap totals. Wow that was a bad contract. But with Felicio to Houston, the Bulls payroll only goes up a net total of about $5 million for 2019, so they’d still have $17ish million to invest into free agency. That might be a veteran wing to replace Porter (Rondae Hollis-Jefferson, Garrett Temple, Terrance Ross, fill in the blank. Probably best case Bojan Bogdanovic).

And maybe there’s an outside chance Mike D’Antoni gets Felicio to fill the mold of the roller in the offense and give some depth behind Clint Capela. Though they still have Nene and could just bring back Kenneth Faried.

Now for the picks. I’m not going to lie, I have no idea how NBA draft pick trading works with all the protections, particularly in the case of the Anthony Davis trade. I have no idea what picks the Pelicans just got from the Lakers, but I do know the Pelicans basically have control of the lakers drafts for the foreseeable future. So if the lakers end up in the lottery in the near future, New Orleans gets the picks.

My point is the Bulls put a bunch of stipulations on the picks so they can get the best picks. The Rockets don’t care. As long as they have James Hardentheir mentality is of a contender (Harden is under contract through 2023). They don’t care about giving away the 26th overall pick, but also for the Bulls, I don’t care getting the 26th pick. So that’s where the stipulations come in.

In this deal, the Bulls get two first round picks. Those first-round picks for 2020, 2021, and 2022 (Houston does not have its 2019 pick), only come to the Bulls if Houston falls in picks 5-14. Again, the Rockets believe they will continue to at least make the playoffs for the next three years. In the case they don’t they lose the pick to the Bulls. However, the Bulls add in that the Rockets can keep their pick if they win the lottery and up in the top 4. Otherwise I don’t think Houston agrees to the stipulations considering they have no leverage should they miss the playoffs. With the changed lottery, they at least have a chance at the top 4 wherever they are. For the Bulls, I feel confident in these stipulations because the West is incredibly deep, so it’s not a given that Houston makes the playoffs.

So the Bulls get the first two picks that happen in this scenario. If Houston misses the playoffs all three years, they get 20 and 21. If they make the playoffs in all three years, then the Bulls get 23 and 24 unprotected and we take what we get. This gives the Bulls control. They take on Paul’s terrible contract for three years in exchange for two ideally attractive first round picks.

So I ask again with this trade, are the Bulls a playoff contender? Or at least are they better than the alternative? For this year it’s basically Paul for Porter, and I think Paul has more value to the Bulls than Porter would. They’re still not a title contender for two years, and at that point Paul enters his last year under contract, and hopefully the Bulls have a better idea of who is part of the plan going forward.

I wouldn’t put it past the Bulls front office to make this trade. They gave Dwayne Wade a huge deal past his prime, hopefully Paul has more prospects. Overall, I do feel Chris Paul in whatever form at least makes the Bulls entertaining. Hopefully the young guys stay healthy and this team can at least be fun to follow. But I do think both teams win. Bulls get an outdated superstar yet headline worthy player that makes the team more appealing to the fans while acquiring draft capital for the long run, and the Rockets shed Paul’s horrendous contract and break up the alleged tension between Paul and harden, while adding some depth on the wing.

And for what it’s worth, if this headline is fabricated, the Rockets aren’t winning the title next year with Paul and Harden.

One more NBA side note: Harrison Barnes declined his $25 million club option with the Kings. I bring this up because Harrison Barnes is nowhere close to $25 million on the open-market, so there’s more layers to this. He could be opting out to restructure a longer term deal with the Kings. Or, with Klay Thompson and Kevin Durant likely done for all of next year, now that Barnes already got paid, maybe he wants to go back to the Bay Area—who desperately need wing depth. Just feel it needed to be brought up.

I plan on releasing my NBA Mock Draft tomorrow.

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