NBA Rumors: Will Rockets Keep or Trade Parsons?

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For the last couple of seasons Parsons, who has yet to make more than a million a season in his career, has been one of the biggest bargains in the league. This past season he had a career year, averaging 16.6 points, 5.5 rebounds and 4.0 assists per game. At 25 years of age, he’s already established himself as a top end starter at his postion, and a heck of a recruiter as well. He really headed up the efforts in selling Dwight Howard on Houston, but will he be around for more than a season?

Like Howard, Parsons is represented by Dan Fegan, one of the most powerful agents in the game. He’s going to seek a near max contract offer for Parsons and it’s possible that he could get it, especially if most of the top free agents on the market stay with their respective teams.

The Rockets protected themselves for this situation. Rather than keeping him another season well below his market value and risk losing him to unrestricted free agency, they’re giving themselves the opportunity to match any offer he gets this season.

Adding a third star is something that Rockets owner Les Alexander has been harping on this offseason, but his general manager Daryl Morey has been a little bit more modest with his expectations – ironic given how easy he’s made acquiring superstars look over the past two seasons.

Ideally, the Rockets would be able to shed Omer Asik’s expiring contract to a team with cap space and get far enough under the cap to try and sign one of the top free agents outright, while either negotiating an extension with Parsons or matching an offer afterwards.

The other scenario is Parsons being sign-and-traded for the third star that Alexander covets. They have all of their future first round picks to pair him up with, along with the expiring contracts of Asik and Lin. That could be appealing the Minnesota Timberwolves, who may or may not try to move Love soon, depending on the time of day seemingly.

There’s not much more certainty surrounding Parson’s venture into restricted free agency either, but the one thing that is for sure is he’s finally going to get the raise he deserves.

Injuries really derailed the Nuggets season, as they were without Danilo Gallinari for the entire season, JaVale McGee for all but five games and Nate Robinson for nearly half of the season. J.J. Hickson also tore his ACL late in the year, so Lawson’s slow recovery is just par the course for them at this point after the way last season went.

Luckily for the Nuggets, even if Lawson can’t practice for another month, he’d still be 100 percent with three months to spare before the start of training camp.

In his first year of a four-year, $48 million contract, Lawson put up the best numbers of his career with 17.6 points, 3.5 rebounds and 8.8 assists a game.

Clear sign New York Knicks trying to move into 1st round: PJ Hairston private workout for Phil Jackson & Knicks Thursday, source told ESPN.

— Jeff Goodman (@GoodmanHoops) June 4, 2014

via Twitter

Jackson has already publicly voiced an interest in trying to purchase an early second round pick, a smart move with a deep draft class like this. He has up to $3 million to use in order to do so, but a second round pick likely won’t be good enough to get Hairston, if he is indeed a target. He’d be a curious one, though, given the presence of J.R. Smith, Iman Shumpert and Tim Hardaway Jr. on the roster already.

Private workouts are not all that uncommon in the predraft process. Just because a team holds one does not mean they’re more serious about drafting that prospect than one they worked out publicly necessarily.

In the case of the Knicks, they have serious needs at the point guard position, so if they do end up trading into the second round, expect for them to go that route. There are going to be several quality lead guard prospects on the board in the second round, including guys like Vasilije Micic, Semaj Christon and Jahii Carson potentially.