As you may have heard, the NBA blocked a three-way trade in which the New Orleans Hornets sent Chris Paul to the LA Lakers.
This spurred some excellent writing around the Internet, almost none of it favorable to NBA Commissioner David Stern.
Here are just a few of the gems:
- “I hope [Hornets GM] Dell Demps resigns and makes a sex tape with a stripper wearing a David Stern Halloween mask. ”
— Bill Simmons crushing it for Grantland.
- “Craven Owners Kill CP3 Deal, Expose David Stern As Flaccid, Powerless Monkey.”
— The Title of a nice piece Silver Screen And Roll.
- “[Expletive] this whole thing. David’s drunk on power, and he doesn’t give a [expletive] about the players, and he doesn’t give a [expletive] about the hundreds of hours the teams put in to make that deal.”
— Unnamed NBA Executive in this excellent Wojnarowski piece.
- “I was certainly wasn’t surprised that Stern did something so heavy-handed, but I was truly shocked that he did something so, well, dumb.”
— Brilliant dissection of the nixed deal at The Painted Area.
. - “Chris Paul Veto: Vindictive and Petty”
— The title of this ESPN article by Michael Wilbon says it all.
Finally, a conspiracy theory. This Hoopspeak article references an ESPN Insider piece by John Hollinger, which argues that Stern may have stopped the trade because he didn’t want the Lakers to destroy themselves. It’s a good theory. Had the deal gone through, the Lakers would have pillaged their frontcourt and mortgaged their future on the cartilege-free knees of Chris Paul, the worn-down knees of an aging Kobe Bryant, and the brittle knees of Andrew Bynum.
