The trade comes almost exactly a year since Finney-Smith signed a four-year, $53 million deal with Houston. The last two years of the contract are non-guaranteed, making him essentially an expiring contract. The forward was expected to be a key two-way forward for Houston but offseason ankle surgery took longer than expected to recover from, and even when he got on the floor Finney-Smith struggled to find his game. Finney-Smith averaged 3.3 points and 2.5 rebounds across 37 games, shooting 33.3% from the field and 27% from three, all career-lows.<\/p>\n
Per ESPN, Houston is sending away a 2027 Memphis Grizzlies second round pick and its own second round picks in 2028 and 2033. It is a relatively steep cost to shed the expiring contract and leaves Houston with at-most two second-round picks through 2033.<\/p>\n
Trading away Finney-Smith comes with financial benefits for the Rockets. It brings them under the NBA’s first apron and the luxury tax. Houston now has access to the approximately $9 million it has left in the non-taxpayer mid-level exception, although using it would hard-cap the Rockets at the first apron and how much of it they can use depends on the structure of Tari Eason’s extension.<\/p>\n
Trading away Finney-Smith’s salary and not taking any back also generates a $13.3 million trade exception that could give the Rockets additional flexibility if they choose to make a trade further in the offseason or into the season.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The move could also help Houston stay under the repeater tax \u2014 which comes with steep financial penalties \u2014 in a few years. Teams enter the repeater tax if they’ve been above the luxury tax for three of the previous four seasons. The Rockets will likely be a regular tax team beginning next season if they agree to terms with Amen Thompson on a lucrative extension.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The trade comes almost exactly a year since Finney-Smith signed a four-year, $53 million deal with Houston. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360172,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[56,58,57],"class_list":["post-360171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360171\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}