NBA Trade News: Minnesota’s Robert Covington Headed to Houston Rockets

The Houston Rockets are looking to trade for Minnesota Timberwolves Small Forward Robert Covington. He is well known for his defensive abilities. The 6-foot-7 Forward averages 12.5 points (45.5% shooting, 36.9% on three-pointers) and 5.3 rebounds in 27.8 minutes per game this season.

His contract is till the 2020-21 season with his salary being a little over 12 million dollars per year. Having entered December, this Sunday (15th of December) is unofficially called the league’s annual trading season.

This is the date when a lot of players who confirmed new contracts in the last offseason are first available to be traded with. This would be a good addition to the team along with James Harden and Russell Westbrook.

The Houston Rockets are already well above the league’s salary cap. In order to make any trade permissible, they have to throw out almost as much money as they take in. These guidelines are under the NBA’s Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA).

To overcome that, the Rockets had believed that an incentive-based agreement to vet center Nene would help decrease the monetary gap. Unfortunately for them, the NBA settled in September not to include the incentive amounts toward Nene’s outgoing trade value, economically.

The incentive for the remaking of the Timberwolves (10-13) to trade Covington, who is going to be 29 years old soon would be present regardless. That would be one or both of the 2020 and 2022 first-round draft picks.

To make a trade statutory under the CBA, the Rockets would fling out close to 9 million dollars in compensation along with those picks. When Nene ($2.6 million)is qualified for the trade on Jan. 15, the Rockets could probably trade Nene.

This would also include Ben McLemore ($2.1 million), and two or three other merest salaries to get there. Unfortunately, the difficulty is that Minnesota would have to clear up four additional roster places.

More plausibly, Rockets General manager Daryl Morey would need to ensure that it is a three or four-team deal. It would also expect owner Tilman Fertitta greenlighting luxury rate mortgages.

Although we have seen deals far more complicated than these turning out to be true. It would be a difficult task for the Houston Rockets to bring in Robert Covington from the Minnesota Timberwolves.