Wow. This happened in my NBA 2k10 career when I was on the Kings and I was like, "Wow, the front office in the game is ridiculous. Good thing that would never happen in real life."
I doubt its true...and Petrie knows that we need to get bigger. He's playing right now, and I doubt a trade would become public when someone is in uniform on the court as we speak.
This would be nothing more than a salary dump and would really stink that that's all we could get for Martin. If this goes down we may as well have made a trade in December.
I've watched the entire miami broadcast. They just mentioned the Howard for Martin rumor briefly at the beginning of the game. They didn't harp on it or imply it was anything other than a rumor. I don't put much stock in this rumor at all.
I'm going to close this unless something more definitive comes up. Note the thread referenced here in the Personnel section -- Marc Stein had the story. The Heat announcers were probably just parroting.