Well, finally someone in the national media went with the story that the Asik to the Pelicans trade is not as a done deal as it may have seemed. Been saying it all last week that the Pelicans didn't have the cap space to fit Asik, and mentioned that if the projections of salary cap came in slightly lower they might get screwed.
http://probasketballtalk.nbcsports.com/2014/07/10/with-lower-than-expected-salary-cap-will-rockets-and-pelicans-still-complete-omer-asik-trade/The trade could still happen, but you have to remind yourself that Houston is working against the clock here. Star players need to make decisions and soon, they're not going to wait around forever.
The funny thing is that Morey could've traded Asik last year to the Celtics... but he wanted to have his cake and eat it too, and it may just end up backfiring on him.
And now it seems like he'll either lose Parsons or end up overpaying him.
Morey is good, but he's been working on these like a pyramid scheme of sorts. Hard to maintain. But we'll see if he can pull it off.
It's why I started that thread last week about how the Celtics could manufacture cap space if willing, and how I envisioned the Celtics having a good shot as any of the teams going after max free-agents.
You can talk about the Bulls and Rockets, but the fact is that they were struggling quite a bit to actually have the required cap space. In part it's why the Lakers, even with their crappy current roster, had a better shot than these teams in getting Carmelo for example.