Woj typically has the best info on these things, and he tweeted on Wednesday, “Houston’s offering Clint Capela, Eric Gordon and PJ Tucker individually to teams w/ space to absorb salary. Rockets trying for best available first-rounder for any of those three, hoping to redirect pick to Philly in pursuit of Jimmy Butler sign-and-trade.”

That’s probably the most accurate version of the story.

Especially since CP3 and Harden alone take the Rockets to $76 million, leaving them just $33 million under the cap (before any other cap holds) and Butler’s max is greater than that, so they almost certainly have to trade for Butler and not sign him outright.

The problem is Houston is looking for assets to them for their players.

That is not what Brian Windhorst said on a podcast yesterday. He said they would attach a #1 to Capela and Gordon for someone to take them so there would be a slot for Butler if he wanted to go there.

He’s probably just done as a real player, but if Isaiah Thomas was willing to sign a 1+1, that would be interesting. Poor son of a gun. He was having such a great career and then kablooey.

Oh, it’s definitely not better than going after Kawhi. But he’s not coming here, right?

But the key thing is that you could even pick up Russell or Brogdon and still have tons of room to park contracts in cap space.

Is that better than going after Brogdon or Kyrie or Noel or Kawhi? Randle and Russell are debatable. I’d probably roll the dice but I can see why you wouldn’t.

I think OKC is willing to attach picks for their other guys (like Roberson). But yeah, it does seem hard to believe they’d need to pair Adams with a pick. As for the other teams, the Clippers might be willing to pair Gallo with a pick. The Spurs are talking about making a move on Bogdanovic and would need to clear out a lot of cap to make that happen. The closer we come to free agency, the more opportunities there will be.

This is the really good free agent class. There are a goodly amount of possible salary dumps right now for that very reason. Steven Adams is a legitimately good player and he might be salary dumped! When teams realize whether they have a legit shot at a free agent, they will begin to need to dump guys. The Lakers, for instance, just earlier today dumped a decent amount of young guys (Mo Wagner wasn’t pathetic this past season as a rookie) and a second round pick just to clear out max space.