Paulo Alves

He's paying the luxury tax this year on a team that pretty clearly doesn't have championship potential.

He's pretty clearly paying the luxury tax so that the Rockets can maintain guys like Dorian Finney-Smith and Clint Capella as trade assets, as matching salary into the offseason and into next year.

So there's lots of little things, but they all point in one direction that this ownership group gets it.

They're willing to spend.

And in terms of the big picture, keeping this team together, opportunities to improve the team moving forward.

This does not feel like a cheap ownership group.

If it ever did, it certainly doesn't feel like that to me now.

And even if, you know, the big story is obviously it's just great to have a WNBA franchise again, Comet Sports Time champions, and hopefully they can, you know, resume that legacy.

I think from a Rockets perspective, it has to be at least something of a positive indicator that this ownership group is, in fact, willing to do what it takes to win at a high level, right?

Yeah, first off, you know, it's awesome that Houston's getting a WNBA team again.

It was always a travesty that the team that won the first three championships just stopped existing, just from a historical perspective.

First four?

First four, I thought it was just three.

Well, first four, it's four.

97, 98, 99, 2000.

Even more so than what I thought.

But a team that clearly has, you know, the history, the legends to, you know, to market itself.

If I do being picky about it, then it really has to be, you know, the Sun, I think, are the fifth worst team in the league.

And they don't own their own first-round pick.

Not going to pretend to be draft guru for the WNBA, but, you know, as far as Tankathon tells me, there's 15, you know, picks in the first round.