Chris Paul was traded to the Los Angeles Lakers on Thursday night from his current post as the lone superstar on the New Orleans Hornets roster, but the trade was vetoed before anything actually came of it. David Stern, apparently on the behalf of fellow NBA owners, decided to cancel the trade for "basketball reasons."
David Stern Says Hornets Have More Value Without Vetoed Chris Paul Trade
Stern and the NBA public relations staff wouldn’t comment any further on Thursday night, but the NBA Commissioner talked about it with representatives from Bloomberg News on Friday morning.
"The decision was taken that Chris Paul in New Orleans was more valuable than the trade that was being discussed," David Stern tells Bloomberg. "I don't want to speak on the basketball side, but that particular one was weighed against Chris Paul's continued presence in New Orleans.''
The trade would have reportedly netted the Hornets Luis Scola and Kevin Martin from the Houston Rockets along with Lamar Odom from the Lakers and a first round pick that Los Angeles had previously acquired from the New York Knicks.
Considering Paul could leave as a free agent at the end of the season without the Hornets getting anything in return, many lauded the deal as fair to middling -- but apparently it wasn’t enough appease the team’s ownership group of the league’s 29 other NBA team owners.
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