NBA vetoes Hornets deal with Lakers

On Thursday evening, mere seconds after I got off the phone with my editor, with whom I was discussing the specifics of a column that would focus on Chris Paul heading to the Los Angeles Lakers, my phone vibrated.

It was a text message: The National Basketball Association's board of governors had ratified the new collective bargaining agreement, the result of a five-plus-month lockout. With the two events in such close proximity, it was difficult not to laugh. For months, the NBA swore it wanted a landscape where the Los Angeles Lakers of the world and the New Orleans Hornets of the world were close to even. Now, the latter was handing its best player to the former.

At least, that is how it appeared. Fewer than three hours after it seemed Paul would go to the Lakers in a three-way trade that also included the Houston Rockets, clouds of doubt moved in over the NBA landscape. Yahoo! Sports columnist Adrian Wojnarowski, the reporter who first published the details of the proposed trade, said just before 9 p.m. that the NBA had vetoed the deal. Oh, and by the way, the NBA owns the New Orleans Hornets.

Read that sentence again. Scratch your head. Think about it. Stick a Q-tip all the way into your ear if necessary. The NBA, pushed by owners who did not like the appearance of a small-market team fresh out of the lockout trading its best player to a marquee team, vetoed a deal that the team it owned engineered. How in the bloody hell does that work? Officially, the league said it nixed the trade for basketball reasons.

Those details will become clear over the course of the next few days, surely. Thursday, on its own, was a day for the ages. Before the Paul fiasco, here are a few things that happened.

- The New York Knicks out-manoeuvred several teams to jump into the lead to acquire free-agent centre Tyson Chandler. Chandler was thought to be a key in getting any team to get Paul to agree to a contract extension. The Knicks, by the way, did not have the requisite cap room to sign Chandler. They would have to use several provisions in the new CBA to get this done.

- The Los Angeles Clippers, once considered a candidate to land Paul, reportedly reached an agreement to sign Caron Butler to a three-year, US$24-million contract. Butler has been healthy enough to play just shy of 42% of 246 possible regular-season games over the past three years. Owners have clearly learned the lesson about not overpaying for middling players.

- The NBA board of governors ratified the new collective bargaining agreement.

That last point, undoubtedly, is the biggest. The new CBA, compared to the old one, is a huge victory for the owners. They get a bigger slice of revenues, a more punitive luxury tax to slightly even the playing field and various restraints on player spending. However, they did not get a few things they wanted: a hard salary cap, the disallowance of extend-and-trade moves like the one that sent Carmelo Anthony to New York last year, and mind control of its star players. The league cannot mandate where its best players want to play.

The delicious irony is that New Orleans general manager Dell Demps swung a pretty good trade for the Hornets. Very rarely can you get equal value for a star player, especially in basketball, a sport in which stars just mean more than in other sports. But facing a situation that he could not turn into a victory, Demps got a good post scorer (Luis Scola), a versatile forward (Lamar Odom), a scoring wing (Kevin Martin) and a draft pick.

The nonplussed owners might have been as worried about what was coming as they were about appearances. The Lakers were set to give up Pau Gasol (heading to Houston) as well as Odom. But they still had Andrew Bynum to dangle for another unhappy star heading for free agency, Orlando's Dwight Howard. With Kobe Bryant, Paul and Howard would have formed a big three to match Miami's.

In a vacuum, it seemed like a fair trade (except maybe for Houston). The league shot it down. Issues of precedent will come up. Other questions persist: Could the league have intervened if New Orleans was not involved? What becomes of Paul now? Will he have to play out his contract in New Orleans, just for appearances? Does David Stern wield any power among the league's owners anymore if he cannot push a fair trade through?

And, most importantly: If the owners were so concerned about league inequality, why did they approve a CBA that did so little to change it? With Stern acting like a beleaguered fantasy-league commissioner, it is impossible to say what comes next.

Paul tweeted "WoW" on Thursday evening, and that is about the most intelligent take anybody could have. After escaping one mess, the league now finds itself in a more complicated one.

ekoreen@nationalpost.com

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