A wild day of Chris Paul trade rumors that appeared to have ended with the New Orleans Hornets star guard headed to the Los Angeles Lakers has taken another bizarre twist. The deal appears to be off after a group on NBA owners protested the swap that would have seen Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom leave the Lakers.
Yahoo! Sports reported that the NBA killed the proposed three-team trade involving the Hornets, Lakers and Houston Rockets.
From Yahoo:
Some owners pushed Stern to demand the trade be nullified, and the Hornets be made to keep Paul on the roster for the foreseeable future, sources said. A chorus of owners were irate with the belief that the five-month lockout had happened largely to stop big-market teams from leveraging small-market teams for star players pending free agency.
“The owners half-pushed this, and Stern took it the rest of the way,” a league source told Yahoo! Sports. “In the end, David didn’t like that the players were dictating where they wanted to go, like Carmelo [Anthony] had, and he wasn’t going to let Chris Paul dictate where he wanted to go.”
You wonder if this puts Paul back in play for the New York Knicks. The only thing we know for sure is that this was one crazy day.