The Knicks have been trying to complete a trade with the Houston Rockets to acquire Tracy McGrady -– or more specifically, to acquire McGrady’s ending contract.
General Manager Donnie Walsh has tried all season to find a taker for Eddy Curry or Jared Jeffries, both of whom are signed for next season. To make a big splash in this summer’s free-agent market, one of both of these players has to go. But the problem is that neither of them is easy to move — in fact, Curry has one of the least desirable contracts in the league.
Walsh may have found a taker for Jeffries, and it also appears that the price he has to pay to get Jeffries off the books is Jordan Hill. The trade, as reported by Yahoo,
would send Jeffries, Hill and either Al Harrington or Larry Hughes to Houston for Tracy McGrady, Brian Cook and Joey Dorsey. Draft picks would also exchange hands, in the Rockets’ favor.
The contracts of McGrady and Cook both end this summer. Dorsey is signed next season for $946,300, but his salary is not guaranteed. This means that the only guaranteed salaries left this summer would be those of Curry, Danilo Gallinari, Wilson Chandler and Toney Douglas, totaling $17.78 million. The league imposes a cap hold when a team has unused roster spots, so the Knicks’ team salary would total $21.57 million.
With an estimated $53 million cap next summer, the Knicks would stand to have as much as $31.5 million with which to pursue free agents. The cream of the crop — LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh — can each sign for $16.57 million, so the Knicks can almost afford two of them. They would still be about $1.7 million short of making a maximum offer to two of these players.
But they would have options. One scheme would be to sign one of these players for the full $16.57 million and then pursue a player on the next rung down, like Atlanta’s Joe Johnson, who might sign for slightly less.
Another possibility would be to sign a maximum-salary free agent while hanging onto David Lee. Lee will continue to count against the Knicks’ cap while he is a free agent, unless the Knicks sign him or renounce him, or he signs elsewhere. To gain the full $31.5 million of cap room they would need to renounce Lee, along with all their other free agents. If they renounce everyone else, Lee would eat up an additional $10 million of their cap space, leaving them with about $21.5 million to spend on other players.
The Knicks could then sign a premier free agent for $16.57 million, leaving them with another $4.9 million to spend on a second player. These two acquisitions would bring them right up to the salary cap, after which they would re-sign Lee. Since the Knicks own Lee’s Bird rights, they could exceed the cap to re-sign him — offering him more than his $10.5 million cap hold.
The team’s roster would then consist of one maximum free agent, one $4.9 million free agent, Lee, Gallinari, Chandler, Douglas and Curry. They would then have six more roster spots to fill, and only minimum salary contracts to offer. But they would also enter the 2010-11 season with Curry as an ending contract, and therefore as a more valuable trade commodity.
If Plan A was to find a taker for Curry, moving Jeffries and Hill in exchange for $9 million additional cap space this summer is a reasonable Plan B.