His ceiling is 25 ppg, 6 rpg, and 6 apg?
He's Joe Johnson pt 2...maybe a little less skilled to be honest.
You do know Joe Johnson averaged 25ppg in a season once right? It's not like what he said was far fetched. That being said, why does everyone assume there's a 25ppg player inside of every up and coming star? You got heads saying Bynum's gonna be one, Harden's gonna be one (and they may be who knows), but only 10 players over the last 3 years have averaged 25ppg or more. It's not exactly frequent.
The max for a guy off his rookie deal is only around 14 milly right?
If Batum got 13 it's a no brainier to give harden the max. They need to trade his ass with Perkins for better depth. Rockets got tons of players on rookie deals and they will bite on them both
For OKC to do that, they'd be taking 2 steps back by doing that. In the short term, they can't really afford to do that. They'd be relying on an relatively inexperienced supporting cast to win the West and that's hard to do.
As for the Rockets, I don't think they'd take Perkins considering the money they just gave Asik and all the other PF's they have.