{"id":836464,"date":"2026-07-31T21:31:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T21:31:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/836464\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T21:31:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T21:31:14","slug":"rockets-owner-tilman-fertitta-is-wise-not-to-meddle-with-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/836464\/","title":{"rendered":"Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta is wise not to meddle with team"},"content":{"rendered":"

You don\u2019t need to understand basketball to own an NBA team.<\/p>\n

You need to understand money. How it talks and walks. The mechanisms it uses to make the world go around. Basketball is merely a conduit.<\/p>\n

For a while, it was unclear whether Houston Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta understood his function. It\u2019s somewhat understandable. When you own something, there\u2019s an understandable instinct to take ownership.<\/p>\n

But Fertitta does not know basketball. He said Chris Paul had the worst contract in the NBA, and traded him for a player with a worse contract, along with draft capital that the Rockets just stopped paying out this summer. It was the worst trade in Rockets history that didn\u2019t involve Moses Malone.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not a mistake he\u2019s set to make again.<\/p>\n

Rockets owner vows to take hands-off approach<\/p>\n

ESPN\u2019s Tim MacMahon says that Fertitta is done \u201cmeddling\u201d with the Rockets.<\/a><\/p>\n

If you Google Fertitta, you won\u2019t see \u201cHouston Rockets owner\u201d autopopulate your search first. You\u2019ll see \u201cU.S. Ambassador to Italy\u201d. If you didn\u2019t know, he\u2019s a big old Trumper.<\/p>\n

Perhaps you\u2019re reading this, and you\u2019re a MAGA guy too. Let\u2019s not digress too far down this rabbit hole. I\u2019m not.<\/p>\n

But as long as Fertitta knows what he has to do to Make The Rockets Great Again (MRAGA, patent pending), he\u2019s OK with me.<\/p>\n

After all, there\u2019s a whole other can of worms to open here. Is Rafael Stone a good General Manager? Is Fertitta even doing the right thing by delegating the work to him?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been quite clear on my take: Yes. Yet, even if you disagree, Fertitta\u2019s thought process is fundamentally sound. Leave the basketball decisions to the basketball decision guy. He\u2019s responsible for the financial decisions.<\/p>\n

There is, of course, crossover there. The Rockets traded Dorian Finney-Smith this summer. It was initially confusing. It was a salary dump, and the Rockets could have signed Marcus Smart without dumping the salary, so why not just stash Finney-Smith at the end of the bench instead of hastily moving him?<\/p>\n

The Rockets were seemingly ducking the second apron of the salary cap. Fertitta was likely thinking about his pockets. It\u2019s hard to blame him if he\u2019s looking to cut costs on a team that won\u2019t win the NBA championship this year anyway. Even then, there are basketball reasons to avoid the second apron. The Rockets don\u2019t want to have their draft picks frozen via the repeater tax.<\/p>\n

It could be said that it\u2019s easy enough for Fertitta to say this now. When the rubber hits the road, and Rafael Stone wants to make a future-focused trade that could hurt the short-term bottom line, Fertitta could step in.<\/p>\n

For now, let\u2019s just be encouraged that he won\u2019t be trading Chris Paul and picks for Russell Westbrook again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You don\u2019t need to understand basketball to own an NBA team. You need to understand money. How it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":836465,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,590,78716,85],"class_list":["post-836464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nba","tag-rockets-analysis","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=836464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/836465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=836464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=836464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=836464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}