Another crazy day in the NBA rumor mill! On the same day baseball star Albert Pujols elects to leave the St. Louis Cardinals for the Anaheim Angles … NBA news is starting to break that center Tyson Chandler is close to agreeing to a deal with the New York Knicks (4 years, $60M) and the Houston Rockets are still searching for a center as they believe Nene is heading back to Denver to re-sign with the Nuggets.

While following the crazy Tyson Chandler and

Chris Paul

rumors today, I started seeing rumors of a three way trade between the Houston Rockets,

New Orleans Hornets

, and

Los Angeles Lakers

. The reason the Rockets are involved? Chris Mannix of Sports Illustrated tweeted this out just minutes ago:

Chris Mannix
Rockets, sources say, were hot after Nene. Rival execs believe he is headed back to Denver at a max or close to max deal.

Pretty surprising news, if you can call it news. Pretty exciting rumor at this point. We could find out as early as tomorrow if Nene is truly coming back as teams are allowed to start inking deals at 12:00 MTN Friday December, 9th.

More on Nene:

Some other tidbits floating around the interwebs:

  • Woj also reporting teams that will offer restricted free agent DeAndre Jordan a contract tomorrow: Denver, Golden State, Houston, and New Orleans. Clips would have three days to match any offer.
  • Nuggets talking to Knicks about a deal for Ronny Turiaf. This would be a salary cap dump move by the Knicks as the Nuggets are so far under the cap they could take back Turiaf’s $4.3 million salary.
  • Knicks close to terms with Tyson Chandler. How can the Knicks afford to bring Chandler aboard? Well, New York is over the cap, so reports are they’d have to do a sign-and-trade for Chandler and send Billups to the Dallas Mavericks or a third team. Billups is in the last year of his deal making $14.2 million. The Knicks could amnesty Billups, meaning they’d pay him $14.2M, but that wouldn’t count against their cap and that would allow them to sign Chandler to a similar deal around $11-$14 million per season.
  • If Chandler goes to NY then I believe it’s a two team race to get Chris Paul. Between the Los Angeles Lakers and New York Knicks. The Lakers have been working on a three team deal that would land Pau Gasol in Houston and CP3 in L.A., and Luis Scola and Kevin Martin (K-Mart Lite) the Hornets + picks.
  • There was a tweet about Billups winding up back in Denver, but with Ty Lawson and Andre Miller on the roster, that makes little sense. I also think there would be a high enough demand by a few teams in need of a veteran point guard that Billups would land elsewhere … maybe quite cheap since the Knicks must pay him if they amnesty him (just wont count against their salary cap.)

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