DuBose: After Fanning on Bosh, Rockets Still Shooting for Stars

HOUSTON — After being unexpectedly jilted by Chris Bosh, the Rockets found themselves in a precarious spot this summer. They are now hoping that Jason Terry, who just turned 37, can be a small part of the solution.

General manager Daryl Morey has said since January that Houston needs to acquire the “third-best player on a championship team” to align with established stars James Harden and Dwight Howard, implying he did not believe that player would be found internally on the current roster. They planned on retaining Chandler Parsons if his salary could be added on top of an established “Big Three.”

But when Bosh and Carmelo Anthony each rejected Houston, the Rockets opted to let Parsons walk to rival Dallas rather than match his near-maximum-salary deal and lock themselves into a Harden-Howard-Parsons core that would essentially remove any hope of future salary cap flexibility.

On paper, Morey and the Rockets put themselves in a favorable cap position. They could be in the mix for elite free agents in 2015 to pair with Harden and Howard such as Rajon Rondo and Goran Dragic, both next July and potentially as early as the February trade deadline.

But Harden and Howard, arguably two of the league’s top 10 players, aren’t prioritizing cap flexibility down the road. They want to win now, and justifiably so. Howard, in particular, came to Houston because he believed it offered him the best opportunity to contend for championships – and he can leave Houston as a free agent as early as 2016 if he isn’t content with the team’s direction and commitment to him.

Because of that, Morey is treading a thin line between retaining flexibility for upcoming trade and free-agency periods while also attempting to help Harden, Howard and the current Rockets remain a top-four team in the loaded Western Conference, where Houston hasn’t won a playoff series since 2009.

Replacing Parsons with Ariza

Step one was luring Trevor Ariza to a reasonable four-year, $32 million deal (on a declining scale) to replace Parsons at small forward. Ariza isn’t the playmaker that Parsons is, but he was a better 3-point shooter and defender than Parsons a year ago, and it could be argued that it makes him a better fit alongside the defensively challenged Harden.

But even on that smaller deal, Harden, Howard, and Ariza will make over $46 million among them in 2015-16. That means that for the Rockets to retain maximum-level flexibility, the rest of the roster generally needs to be filled out with one-year contracts.

Search for shooters

This is where Terry comes in. It wasn’t well-publicized, but the Rockets made free agency runs at both Ray Allen and Mike Miller this summer. One reason was to put players with championship experience around a younger core, but another was a general dearth of 3-point shooting.

Despite leading the league with 26.6 3-point attempts per game last season, the Rockets were just 15^th in accuracy at 35.8 percent. Of the team’s established rotation players heading into the playoffs, only Parsons shot higher than the league-average 36 percent from the arc. For a team that thrives on spacing and frequently finds open perimeter shots based on the interior attention drawn by Howard, it was a shockingly low number.

They did replace Parsons with Ariza, who shot 41 percent from distance a season ago. But depth issues remain. The backup swingman spots in Houston were a revolving door of mediocrity based on whoever had the hot hand, with journeymen Francisco Garcia and Jordan Hamilton each receiving significant opportunities.

By April, they were desperate enough that Troy Daniels – an undrafted, undersized rookie shooting guard who spent most of the season with the Rio Grande Valley Vipers of the D-League — was called up during the season’s final week. Daniels almost immediately jumped ahead of Garcia and Hamilton and unexpectedly became a fixture in the playoff rotation. Although Daniels did hit a game-winning 3-pointer in Game 3 in Portland, the Rockets were still woefully short on shooters for a team that takes such a high volume of perimeter shots.

Enter Terry, who hit almost 38 percent from the arc last season and has shot no lower than 36 percent from deep in each of his past 10 seasons. It won’t matter if his knee remains injured, as it was during his brief and woeful 2013-14 campaign in Brooklyn (and Sacramento, where he never played). But if Terry is healthy again – and he says he is – it’s potentially a sneaky, under-the-radar move to bolster the team’s rotation.

Following the deal, Terry told the Houston Chronicle that most of his issues were caused by health:

“I’m 100 percent now,” Terry said. “Last season, coming off surgery, I never gave it a chance to heal properly and then strengthen. I tried to rush back. That just set me back even further.

“I worked extremely hard every single day to strengthen the knee and to get back at full strength. In my off-season training, I’ve been able to go extremely hard and I’ve been able to do everything. That was something I was limited in last season.”

Even if he is not, nabbing two additional second-round picks for taking on Terry’s contract and acquiring his $5.8 million expiring salary could prove useful in Houston’s deadline proposals next February. That’s a decent return for a trade package of only Alonzo Gee and Scotty Hopson, two unguaranteed contracts who were unlikely to even make the roster.

It was low risk with a moderately high reward, which is exactly what Morey craves in the interim.

Filling out the rotation on one-year deals

Along that same theme is 24-year-old rookie Kostas Papanikolaou, whom the Rockets plucked away from Spanish League champion FC Barcelona after acquiring his rights in the June 2013 trade that sent Thomas Robinson to Portland (and cleared salary space for Howard).

Papanikolaou, who played for Greece in the 2014 FIBA World Cup, is regarded as a “3-and-D” small forward who should back up Ariza and – in the eyes of the team – provide above-average shooting and defense with considerable upside. The Rockets may have overpaid a bit by giving him $4.8 million guaranteed in 2014-15 (most of their mid-level exception). But by doing so, Morey was able to get the second year of his contract unguaranteed, preserving flexibility in 2015.

Houston also hopes to have found a viable bench contributor at power forward in Jeff Adrien, who slipped through the cracks in free agency despite putting up 13.0 points and 8.9 rebounds in 12 starts with Milwaukee to close out the 2013-14 season. Adrien signed a one-year deal at the veteran’s minimum.

It’s not the optimal scenario for a team that fancies itself an NBA title contender, especially when the Rockets were seemingly so close to having a starting five of Harden, Howard, Bosh, Parsons and Pat Beverley – one that might have been the most talented in the entire NBA. Houston also traded Jeremy Lin and Omer Asik off its bench, although it should be noted the Rockets had nearly the same winning percentage with the offense-driven Donatas Motiejunas as their backup center (20-11, .645) as with Asik.

But it’s not doomsday, either. The Rockets went 54-28 (.659) in the first season of the Howard era and were progressively better as the season moved along. Their 33-15 mark (.688) after Jan. 1 would have extrapolated to 56 or 57 wins over a full schedule, putting them roughly in line with the third-seeded Clippers and slightly behind the second-seeded Thunder.

The Rockets probably aren’t a legit title contender until Morey makes his next “big” move. But in Terry, Papanikolaou and Adrien, the Rockets hope to have found solutions to some of their major depth issues from a season ago – namely shooting, defense and interior scoring off the bench. And they did it with one-year deals, thus not compromising the financial flexibility Morey believes is essential.

The Rockets are still more concerned with what could be than what is, and it remains to be seen how Harden and Howard respond to that. But quietly, Morey is putting together an offseason that he hopes will keep them from taking the step back that so many feared after fanning on Bosh and Parsons in early July.

Ben DuBose is a veteran Houston-based sports reporter who has followed the Houston Rockets and the NBA since Hakeem Olajuwon was Akeem Olajuwon. He writes for SheridanHoops and ClutchFans, an independent Rockets blog. You can follow him on Twitter.