Proposed Los Angeles Lakers - Chris Paul trade shot down amid rumours of unrest in NBA boardroom
The NBA on Thursday backed out of a trade that would have sent Chris Paul to the Los Angeles Lakers. The New Orleans Hornets super star is the subject of intense speculation as teams circle New Orleans in anticipation of picking
off their brightest talent.
The Lakers had seemingly won the race for the gifted point guard in a three way trade that also featured the Houston Rockets. However, in a board meeting to ratify the new Collective Bargaining Agreement, small market NBA owners
reportedly raised hue and cry over a move they saw as detriment to the competitiveness of the NBA.
The NBA, which currently owns the Hornets, cancelled the move afterwards but denied that the other owners influenced that decision.
NBA spokesman Mike Bass says: "It's not true that the owners killed the deal, the deal was never discussed at the Board of Governors meeting and the league office declined to make the trade for basketball reasons."
The trade would have seen Lamar Odom and Andrew Bynum head to New Orleans in return for Paul while Lakers star power forward Pau Gasol would have been sent to Houston, with a number of other less prominent players also changing
teams to make the wheels go round.
How long the Hornets can hang on to Paul though is still an unanswered question. Chris is reportedly determined not to sign an extension with the franchise that doesn’t provide him with a platform to compete on the highest level,
and is only ever getting weaker.
The Hornets also know that he won’t sign on and therefore want to trade him now rather than lose him for nothing next season, when his contract runs out. New Orleans President Hugh Weber said they are not really left with many
options other than trading the point guard, and that reality has been clear on them for quite a while.
"We've been preparing for this moment for over a year and it's not like we were surprised or caught flat-footed," Weber said, as quoted by ESPN. "This is not a surprise. This is not something where we've been sitting around waiting
to see what would happen. We've been managing this and taking control of the situation as best we can and we're going to have a team that we believe achieves that objective of making this community proud."
While the Hornets have done a good job of getting popular support behind the franchise, the fact remains that they are a small market very unlikely to ever be a force in the NBA and these advances will continue.
The Lakers might have been rebuffed this time; but it isn’t likely that New Orleans would be able to resist the advances of other big market sides.
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