The Houston Rockets still haven’t resolved their future with or without Clint Capela. Given that the Rockets have matching rights given Capela’s status as a restricted free agent, playing the long game is neither abnormal or particularly risky. There’s no way Houston can lose Capela to another NBA team this summer without making a conscious decision to let him go. (Capela could pull a Josh Childress and sign overseas, but that’d be incredibly shocking given how much NBA money is on the table.)
The Rockets’ real risk isn’t in losing him this summer and going into the 2018-19 season without their starting center. The risk is in losing him next summer. And that could happen if Capela signs his $4.7 qualifying offer.
The qualifying offer is the one-year contract teams must extend to restricted free agents to keep them in restricted status. It allows those teams to match offer sheets signed by the players. Restricted status only exists for players early in their careers (four years or less of NBA service time) and can be a real thorn in players’ sides.
So it is for Capela.
The players for which restricted free agency is hardest are those really, really good building blocks who aren’t quite stars. Those players are often looking for the maximum contract or something close; their incumbent teams are often looking for a bargain, especially when those franchises have stars on the books. This fits Houston and Capela. The Rockets have James Harden, Chris Paul, and Eric Gordon. Capela is more important than Gordon, in all likelihood, but Houston has leverage here. It’d be irresponsible as a franchise not to use it.
The problem for Capela is that all of the limited salary cap space that existed this summer has dried up. The Sacramento Kings are the last team with meaningful cap space, and the $11 million that franchise has after locking up Nemanja Bjelica and Yogi Ferrell isn’t near enough for Capela. As such, without additional moves, there’s no team out there that can offer Capela the contract he’s holding out for.
Houston now has not just the ability to match any signed offer sheet. Houston is now the only teamthat can offer him a massive contract. The Rockets hold all of the cards ...
... except one.
This is that risk mentioned above: that Capela could sign his $4.7 million qualifying offer, play the 2018-19 season with the Rockets with a de facto no-trade clause, and become an unrestricted free agent on July 1, 2019. Houston would be powerless to stop Capela from leaving in a year, and powerless to do anything else with him between now and then.
Many players of Capela’s caliber have threatened this before; Greg Monroe is the only guy to actually follow through. (Other QO signers, like Nerlens Noel, weren’t quite at this level of prominence.) Some QO threateners have eventually inked lucrative deals with the teams which with they are having a showdown; Tristan Thompson is the most successful example, albeit with some special circumstances given his representation (Klutch Sports) and the Cavaliers’ particular power structure under LeBron.
The only way to make the threat legitimate is to be prepared to follow through. Signaling that is hard; there’d probably need to be an ultimatum and a deadline. Capela’s camp needs to decide if he is really ready to leave tens of millions of guaranteed dollars on the table for the chance to goose that number in a year. (The Rockets offered a 5-year, $85 million extension on July 1, according to reports. There’s no certainty that deal remains on the table.)
This is the trade-off players assess when they sign under-market early extensions before their fourth season. In 2012, having struggled with ankle injuries despite showing flashes of greatness, Stephen Curry took guaranteed millions instead of betting on himself. Had he waited, he’d have inked a maximum deal as a restricted free agent in 2013. (As a result, the Warriors never would have had the cap space for Kevin Durant.) But every player has to make that calculation: security vs. salary. A bird in the hand or a bag in the bush.
That’s where Capela finds himself. If that $85 million deal is still on the table, and Capela’s team determines that given the Swiss center’s trajectory and the Rockets’ high expectations plus the much more open market expected next summer, he stands to make a lot more even taking into account the discount he’d need to take this next season ... then Capela probably ought to take the qualifying offer. If the calculus suggests that perhaps Capela won’t get a much bigger offer next summer than what the Rockets already put on the table, or that the center’s value is much higher in Houston than it might be elsewhere, then perhaps continued contract negotiations are the path forward.
There are only those two options left, though. As often happens with restricted free agents, everything else has dried up. The league’s rules around restricted free agency remain one of the most powerful forces in the NBA, despite the lack of attention they receive. Capela and the Rockets are feeling that impact right now, with differing results.