Van Horn Selected As NBA Lottery Winner

By Chris Littmann
A few minutes before last night’s All-Star Game tipped off, I got a phone call from my old college roommate, asking me what I thought of the redone Jason Kidd-to-Dallas deal. Specifically, we were talking about the inclusion of Keith Van Horn.
My friend posed the question: “If the Mavericks are trading Van Horn, can the Cavs trade Brad Daugherty or Mark Price?”
In case you haven’t been paying attention, KVH has been out of the league since the 2005-06 season when the Mavs went to the Finals and lost to the Heat, so really, trading an ESPN NASCAR analyst didn’t seem that much worse.
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How does a guy who is kicking it at home as a dad wind up being a key piece in a deal for an All-Star point guard? Didn’t make any sense to me either. The next step was ringing up our NBA guru, Stan McNeal.
I asked him to try and explain this to me; he laughed. But he can only laugh because otherwise we’d probably all start crying if we tried to seriously explain this ridiculous loophole that exists.
McNeal spent a little time picking the brain of one NBA team’s cap expert. And even someone who works with the cap on a day-to-day basis couldn’t explain how Van Horn was about to get $4-5 million just for being part of a deal to New Jersey. Here’s another fun fact, according to McNeal: If they wanted, the Mavericks could even use fossils like Kevin Willis and Vernon Maxwell in a deal.
These players are informally known as cap-hold guys, something teams have in most cases when they’re over the cap. Teams under the cap cannot have these players.
The best recent example? Aaron McKie, who was working as an assistant with the Sixers and also drawing a salary from a buyout of a previous deal, was shipped to the Grizzlies because the Lakers still had his rights. (At least in the case of McKie, he plans to stick around and fill a role as a player/coach, according to the Commercial-Appeal)
And that’s where this gets tricky: At first, it didn’t even appear Van Horn would have to show up if he was dealt, but the Dallas Morning News reports NBA commish David Stern said KVH must be “serious about resuming his career” for the deal to go through.
So to answer my friend’s question: Unless Brad Daugherty or Mark Price still have something left in the tank, it doesn’t look like they can be moved. Now if the Cavs could just get someone to take Larry Hughes.
UPDATE: Sounds like it’s all but a done deal. Keith Van Horn gets his $4 million lotto ticket for what will be 30 days of work, according to the Star-Ledger.↵