Sve vesti - bez komentarisanja

[T-Snell]

Free agent forward Jason Collins will return to the Atlanta Hawks with a one-year deal, a league source tells Yahoo! Sports.

Yahoo - Woj

[T-Snell]

Knicks nearing deal to land Chandler

The New York Knicks are nearing a four-year, $58 million contract with Tyson Chandler(notes) after the Golden
State Warriors conceded they’re no longer in the running to sign the free-agent center, league sources told Yahoo! Sports.

To add Chandler, the Knicks will either use their amnesty clause to waive Chauncey Billups(notes) and his $14.2 million salary or they will trade him,
sources said. The Knicks have privately told people that if they trade Billups – who has said he doesn’t want to leave New York – it will be to a “good” team. If the Dallas Mavericks do a sign-and-trade with Chandler, they could conceivably get Billups in return.

The Knicks’ pursuit of Chandler intensified after efforts to trade for New Orleans Hornets point guard Chris Paul(notes) stalled, sources said.

Chandler was an important contributor during the Mavericks’ run to last season’s NBA championship, averaging 10.1 points, 9.4 rebounds and 1.1 blocks in 74 games. The Mavericks have been reluctant to offer Chandler a competitive, long-term extension, preferring to save their money to spend on the 2012 free-agent class, which could include Dwight Howard(notes) and Deron Williams
(notes).

Comcast Bay Area first reported the Knicks’ interest in Chandler. CBSSports.com reported the Knicks’ potential amnesty of Billups.


http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news;_yl..._knicks_120811

[T-Snell]

Evo i u malo konkretnijem obliku za one koji ne veruju zlom Twitter-u i zlom adminu.



Lakers set to land Paul


The Los Angeles Lakers have reached an agreement in principle to acquire All-Star point guard Chris Paul in a three-team trade that will cost them Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom, league sources told Yahoo! Sports.

The Lakers are finalizing the trade with the New Orleans Hornets and Houston Rockets. Under terms of the proposed deal, the Lakers would send Gasol to the Rockets. The Hornets would receive Odom, Rockets guards Kevin Martin and Goran Dragic and forward Luis Scola, league sources said.

“It’s not finalized, but we’re close,” one front-office official involved in the negotiations said.

It is likely the Hornets will receive draft picks as part of the package for Paul. “Those are still being determined,” a source in the talks said.

Hornets general manager Dell Demps informed two of the other finalists for Paul on Thursday evening that he had a deal in place for Paul to go the Lakers, front-office sources said.

Paul had listed the Lakers as one of his preferred destinations, and it became a more clear choice for him on Thursday after the New York Knicks moved to the brink of completing a four-year, $58 million contract for free-agent center Tyson Chandler. The Knicks lost the salary-cap space they would’ve needed to sign Paul this summer, and the Lakers had been pushing hard to close a deal for Paul with Houston and New Orleans.

The Lakers could turn their attention toward using center Andrew Bynum as a trading chip to make a play for Orlando Magic center Dwight Howard.


http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news;_yl...ets_nba_120811

[LBJmvpFORlife]

TRADE REACTION: Chris Paul to L.A., Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom go



December, 8, 2011

By Brian Kamenetzky


ESPN.com
Archive


Among the things we learned today on the last day of voluntary workouts in El Segundo is that Steve Blake doesn't care if he starts or not. Good thing, because the Lakers have acquired Chris Paul from the Hornets in exchange for Pau Gasol (likely on his way to Houston) and Lamar Odom.

More information is likely to come through over the next few days, I would think, but in the interim, here are some of the big questions in the immediate aftermath:

1. How does this impact Kobe Bryant?

In the newest edition of The Forum, we discussed whether, given a choice between Paul and Dwight Howard, which way the Lakers should go. The answer was Howard, not only because he represents an upgrade over Andrew Bynum at center, but the smallest amount of fundamental change for how the Lakers play. They'd still be constructed around a pair of bigs, and Kobe. Now, they have one high-end big, and an elite point guard.

It's great in theory, but it thrusts Lakers and Bryant into uncharted territory. He's never played with an elite point guard, or even a high end one since L.A. parted with Nick Van Exel. With Paul, the Lakers have a guy who will, or at least should, dominate the ball in a way Kobe always has. Don't get me wrong - there's plenty of potential in the pairing. It could be cosmically awesome, and help extend Kobe's life as an elite player. But in his 16th year, he'll have to change how he operates, which is no easy task.

2. How does it impact Paul?

You don't bring him here unless he's allowed to do what he does, but at the same time, it doesn't make much sense to turn Kobe into an off-ball, weak side player, either. Playing with a guy like Kobe is going to require adjustment on his part, as well.

3. What does this mean for the Howard thing?

The Lakers still have Bynum, and if the plan is still to push for Howard, Drew is obviously the chip. That they can hold on to him in the Paul deal is obviously huge, but will it be enough to entice the Magic? Moving Odom leaves the Lakers short the other half of their presumptive trade for Howard. What can the Lakers add to replace him? Surely other teams will offer something more impressive than Bynum and L.A.'s remaining flotsam and jetsom.

4. How does it impact the present?

The backcourt is absurd, but who do the Lakers line up at forward? Where they once had the most formidable and versatile frontcourt in the NBA, the purple and gold are now frightfully thin up front, pending any additional moves bringing more players back to Los Angeles. The Lakers now have Andrew Bynum, no power forward, no backup power forward, and no backup center unless you count Derrick Caracter. Maybe Ron Artest can move to the four, but he's hardly an ideal solution. And by the way, Bynum can't play the first five games of the season.

More moves have to be coming.

So while the Lakers now have their next superstar, they are, at this very moment, not a better team. They could be, but right now, they're not. They have given up a ton of material and left their roster unbalanced. The luxury of two seven-footers (more or less) as skilled as Gasol and Odom is very, very difficult to overstate.

Moreover, they've just added a massive amount of complication to Mike Brown's first season. With virtually no training camp at his disposal, Brown now must install a new system on both ends of the floor with a roster now undergoing massive upheaval.

5. What if Bynum stays?

If Bynum really has developed the 15-footer he's been working on for a while, but hasn't really needed because of Pau's presence, fans could have more reason to be excited about the pairing of Bynum and Paul than Paul and Kobe. If CP3 thought Tyson Chandler was the greatest thing since sliced bread, he's going to love Drew, who has more offensive game and the softest hands of any center in the NBA.

An argument can be made that offensively at least, the Lakers are better off with Bynum than Howard in a pairing with Paul (assuming good health for Bynum, of course).

6. So what happens if Paul's knee goes wonky?

Don't even ask.





http://espn.go.com/blog/los-angeles/...dom-mike-brown

[LBJmvpFORlife]

NBA Executive On Chris Paul Trade Veto: '[Expletive] This Whole Thing'

by Tom Ziller • Dec 9, 2011 8:15 AM EST

When the Schrempf hits the fan in the NBA, Yahoo!'s Adrian Wojnarowski gets the best quotes and tidbits. As such, you'll want to read an epic rant from an anonymous league executive who was engaged in talks for Chris Paul before the New Orleans Hornets agreed to trade the All-Star to the L.A. Lakers and David Stern subsequently vetoed the deal. A snip is below the jump.



"We were all told by the league he was a trade-able player, and now they're saying that Dell doesn't have the authority to make the trade?" said an NBA executive who had periodic talks with New Orleans throughout the process. "Now, they're saying that Dell is an idiot, that he can't do it his job. [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 into make that deal.

Seriously, go read the whole thing if you missed it on Thursday night.


http://www.sbnation.com/nba/2011/12/...o-nba-reaction

http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news;_yl...ets_nba_120811 This is the whole thing.

[LBJmvpFORlife]

Dwight Howard to Nets?


By Chris Sheridan

December 09, 2011 at 8:27 AM


There is a question mark in that headline because there needs to be one.
Things are going to change by the hour today, and who knows what kind of twists and turns the Chris Paul trade fiasco is going to take before the league officially re-opens for business at 2 p.m. EST.
In case you missed it, 86 percent of the players who cast ball0ts voted to approve the new labor agreement before commissioner David Stern 86′d the three-team trade that would have sent Paul to the Los Angeles Lakers. If that vote were to be held again today, there’s no way that percentage would come in so high.
So what does this mean for Dwight Howard? I was hearing last night that a Howard-to-LA trade was a real possibility, and Cavs owner Dan Gilbert mentioned the same thing in his e-mail to the commissioner urging him to void the Paul deal.
Nevertheless, Chris Broussard of ESPN is reporting that Howard is prepared to tell the Magic he wants to be traded to the New Jersey Nets:
“Howard has yet to tell the Magic he will not re-sign with them after this season, but the sources said he will within the next few days, perhaps as early as Friday. There is also a chance that Howard will not attend the opening of training camp Friday, according to a source. As ESPN.com reported last week, the Nets are ready to offer the Magic a package built around center Brook Lopez and two first-round draft picks, New Jersey’s own and one the Nets acquired from Houston in a previous trade, according to sources. New Jersey is also willing to take back Hedo Turkoglu and the three years, $34 million remaining on his deal. … The Nets are continuing to pursue free-agent center Nene in case their plan to acquire Howard falls through.”
In Florida, columnist Josh Robbins of the Orlando Sentinel weighs in:
“If Howard makes it known that he will only sign long-term with New Jersey, other potential bidders would be scared away by the slim chances of re-signing him. And if other teams are too scared to make substantial bids, the Nets will have the best offer on the block. Magic officials like Lopez, a 7-foot-tall center who is about to enter only his fourth NBA season. But that “like” is relative. The number of quality centers is at its lowest level in decades, and it’s not necessarily a great achievement to be, say, the eighth-to-10th best center in the game. The Los Angeles Lakers’ Andrew Bynum, another 7-footer, hasn’t reached his potential yet, and he’s an injury risk already at 24 years old with questionable knees. But his upside is much higher than Lopez’, and Magic officials know it. What the Nets could offer is the ability to put the Magic far under the cap: The Magic would be sending out far more money than they’d be taking in. And then the Magic could use the amnesty provision on Gilbert Arenas. Those moves would suddenly give the Magic some badly needed payroll flexibility.
It remains to be sen what kind of trickle-down effect the events of last night will have on other teams’ planned roster moves. For instance, do the Knicks still want to amnesty Chauncey Billups in order to facilitate a deal that would bring them Tyson Chandler? Or does it behoove them to hold their cards until they see how the CP3 situation shakes out? Remember, Paul’s preferred destination from the get-go was New York, and the New York Post is reporting that the Knicks made an offer of Amare Stoudemire for Paul.
Fasten your seat belts, folks. It’s going to be a rollercoaster ride today.


http://www.sheridanhoops.com/2011/12...oward-to-nets/

[3 sekunde u reketu]

http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news?slu...s_trade_120811

Помињано писмо Гилберта Штерну.

I cannot remember ever seeing a trade where a team got by far the best player in the trade and saved over $40 million in the process. And it doesn’t appear that they would give up any draft picks, which might allow to later make a trade for Dwight Howard. (They would also get a large trade exception that would help them improve their team and/or eventually trade for Howard.) When the Lakers got Pau Gasol (at the time considered an extremely lopsided trade) they took on tens of millions in additional salary and luxury tax and they gave up a number of prospects (one in Marc Gasol who may become a max-salary player).

Едит. Погрешио сам тему.

[T-Snell]

Aldridge: Magic considering filing tampering charges


The Orlando Magic are contemplating filing tampering charges against two unnamed NBA teams for illegal contact with its franchise center, Dwight Howard, according to a league source.

The Magic believe at least one of the teams have had contact with Howard -- who reportedly wants to be traded -- as recently as Thursday. If the team substantiates that belief, it will immediately file charges with the league, the source said.

Howard has not publicly indicated that he wants to be dealt, and privately, the communications between Howard, his agent, Dan Fegan, and the Magic have produced mixed signals. At points, Howard indicates he might want to stay with the Magic, who have become a championship contender on his watch -- only the Lakers and Celtics have won more regular season and playoff games over the last four years. But at other points, he indicates dissatisfaction with the makeup of the team. Orlando has had a contract extension on the table for Howard for some time, but he has -- like other star players in recent years -- not signed it.

ESPN reported early Friday that Howard will request to be traded to the New Jersey Nets. The source indicated that as of Friday morning, neither Howard nor his representatives had made such a request. NBA training camps opened Friday.

A trade to New Jersey would pair Howard with All-Star guard Deron Williams -- who, like Howard, is expected to opt out of the final year of his contract, not sign the extension offer on the table from New Jersey and become a free agent. In both cases, opting out is the financially smart move. Under the rules of the just-ratified new collective bargaining agreement, taking an extension on the existing contract could cost both players more than $25 million; signing a new deal after becoming a free agent would be worth more than $100 million.

The Magic, the source said, will not allow a repeat of the Shaquille O'Neal departure from Orlando to Los Angeles in 1996, when O'Neal walked as a free agent and the Magic were left with nothing. If the organization ultimately decides it has no choice but to trade Howard, it will do so. But the Magic will decide where he goes. The source said a reported proposed package by the Nets of center Brook Lopez and Draft picks for Howard is not at all interesting to the Magic.

The Magic, the source said, will not let Howard dictate the terms of where he wants to go.

"This will not be another Shaq situation," the source said. The Magic will "do what's in the best interests of the organization" and will not be left with nothing.

The Howard developments come a day after the NBA nixed a potential trade of four-time All-Star guard Chris Paul from the Hornets to the Lakers in a three-team deal that would have sent forward Pau Gasol to the Rockets and forward Lamar Odom to New Orleans. The Hornets would have received forward Luis Scola, guards Kevin Martin and Goran Dragic and a 2012 first-round pick from Houston.

A source directly involved in those talks said Friday morning that the Hornets were not planning to appeal the nixing of the deal, as ESPN reported Friday. Rather, the Hornets will try to see if sweetening the current deal in some way would make it more acceptable to the league, which currently owns the Hornets while it seeks a permanent owner who will keep the team in New Orleans. The Hornets also have several other possible deals on the table for Paul, and could go forward with one of those if teams involved in those deals make enhancements to their offers, the source said.

New Orleans' management, the source said, is determined to make a deal for Paul, who reportedly was not going to show up for the first day of the Hornets' camp. Like Orlando, the Hornets will not allow Paul to play out the final year of his deal, become a free agent next summer and leave with the team getting nothing in return.


http://www.nba.com/2011/news/12/09/m...rge/index.html

[T-Snell]

NBA Rumors: Celtics Could Trade Glen Davis To Magic For Brandon Bass


The Boston Celtics are in talks to execute a sign-and-trade deal that would send free agent Glen Davis to the Orlando Magic for power forward Brandon Bass, reports the Boston Herald (via CelticsBlog). Davis has spent his entire four-year career in Boston, and is one of a number of scoring power forward on the market.

The Magic's plans for Dwight Howard remain unknown, and the Celtics have consistently been tied to Chris Paul rumors, renewed now that the league has blocked the New Orleans Hornets' attempted trade with the L.A. Lakers. The terms of Davis' potential new contract are also unknown, but Bass is due $8 million over the next two seasons, making him a very affordable contributor.

Trades and free agent signings can officially be consummated beginning at 2 p.m. ET on Friday. The NBA lockout was lifted late Thursday, opening the door for the return of normal business.


http://www.sbnation.com/2011-nba-fre...-orlando-magic

[LBJmvpFORlife]

NBA turns Chris Paul deal into disaster

2011-12 SEASON, TRADE FALLOUT | COMMENTS


The three-team trade that would've sent Chris Paul to the Lakers was a fair deal. (US PRESSWIRE)

Throughout the lockout, I kept returning to the same question: What kind of league does the NBA want to be? How would it like players to move around? League officials talked incessantly of competitive balance, and Adam Silver spoke about “restricting player movement” so that all 30 teams could compete on more equal footing. And yet the owners, both at the start and finish of the talks, proposed a set of rules that guaranteed more mid-level veteran types would be flying around the league each summer as teams craved cap flexibility.

And so it became clear: The league was fine with more player movement, provided the “right” sort of players were moving. That group did not include franchise-level stars or players on inexpensive rookie deals. The NBA wanted to keep young players tethered on the cheap to teams that draft them, and it wanted to increase the advantage incumbent teams had in keeping their own stars. Home teams had always been able to offer more money and more years, but that hadn’t been enough to keep LeBron James in Cleveland or Carmelo Anthony in Denver, with the latter using the extend-and-trade loophole to choose his team and get the money only Denver could offer.

The NBA and the union settled on piecemeal solutions to this non-problem. They tweaked the extend-and-trade rules to make Melo-style moves more difficult, timing-wise, and less lucrative. They sought to prevent luxury tax teams from executing sign-and-trade transactions, though they held off until 2013-14, just enough time for Chris Paul and Dwight Howard to go this route if they were willing to take a bit less cash and a shorter deal. They allowed incumbent teams to offer annual raises 3 percentage points higher than rival suitors could — half a percentage point larger than the gap in the old deal.

And guess what? None of this has made any difference, something anyone paying attention could have predicted months ago. If the NBA really wanted to keep stars in place or help team that lose star players, it needed to do something dramatic: a hard cap, a franchise player tag, draft pick compensation for teams that lose free agents, or the institution of unlimited maximum salaries, so that teams could only realistically afford one star player. The league pushed for only one of those things — a hard cap — and they gave up on that fight once it became clear the union would never accept it. And these are dramatic changes. Pushing for any of them might have cost the entire season, a catastrophic outcome the league (justifiably) could not accept.

And so we got awkward compromises, unintended consequences and a system that looks very much like the old one. That’s the trade-off: Skirt a disastrous missed season, accept the consequences of a collective bargaining agreement filled with compromises. The deal did not remove Paul’s ability to tell the Hornets he would leave after this season. It didn’t remove his freedom to warn any team interested in acquiring him that he would enter free agency regardless. Heck, the deal actually encouraged Paul to enter free agency by limiting the length of an extension any team — including the Hornets — could offer him now.

That is the compromise the NBA made to save the season. But on Thursday, they decided they could not live with that compromise and made the short-sighted, panicked decision to veto Chris Paul’s trade to the Lakers — a decision the three teams involve are appealing today, ESPN.com reports. It was not an unfair deal. The Lakers got the best piece involved, but they also surrendered two of their four best players and turned a unique strength — their length on the front line–into a weakness. The Hornets got a “B”-level return — several solid near-All-Stars, assets you could easily flip later, but no blue-chipper on the level of Stephen Curry (probably unavailable to them so far), Eric Gordon (ditto) or Rajon Rondo (reportedly very available to New Orleans, and a possible missed opportunity for them). The Rockets got one of the world’s 15 best players in Pau Gasol, a franchise-level center, and they probably weren’t done.

Everyone had risks or rewards here. This was not a heist for the Lakers — not even close. And they earned this trade by acquiring the right kinds of assets to make it. They got Odom in the Shaquille O’Neal trade, a deal that set their franchise back during the mid-2000s. They got Gasol in the classic predatory big-market style of nabbing an expensive player in exchange for expiring contracts (Kwame Brown) and flotsam, but as Memphis showed last season, the Lakers paid a price. Having money absolutely helped the Lakers land the Paul trade bait and keep it in Laker colors until the moment came to strike. And having money would have helped the Lakers stomach the tax bills that would come down the road, notwithstanding Dan Gilbert’s inaccurate and misguided claims, made in an email to Stern, that the Lakers were going to bank massive savings from this trade.

The larger point is this: Stars have leverage in basketball, and they always will, unless you want to return the reserve system Oscar Robertson fought against forty years ago. Robertson, by the way, negotiated himself a no-trade clause in Cincinnati and vetoed a deal in 1970 that would have sent him to Baltimore. Why? Because Robertson preferred a deal to Milwaukee, where he could team up with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He got his way.

None of this is new. Stars dominate the game and tilt the balance of power when they move, and they’ll want to move when they’re unhappy. Kevin Durant, Derrick Rose and Tim Duncan are not unhappy, and so they have not moved and have no plans to. The Hornets and Magic had more than a half-decade to make their stars happy, and both of them came close; the Magic made the Finals in 2009 and should have again the next season, and the Hornets nearly won the west’s top seed in 2008 before injuries, whiffed draft picks and poor free agency signings doomed them to mediocrity.

The Hornets were insanely lucky to draft Chris Paul — thanks Atlanta and Portland! — and the combination of luck, skill and management would always determine whether Paul would stay a Hornet forever. That is how it has always been. The league could have pushed for a system that would change that reality in a meaningful way, but it chose not to. Making that push would have cost the league the season, and it likely would have involved reaching for player movement restrictions many NBA observers — this one included — would have found ethically repugnant.

The NBA, for reasons good and convenient, chose compromise instead. It chose Band-Aids and tweaks, and it chose to allow the Knicks to spend $30 million this season on Tyson Chandler — the combined value of Chandler’s reported salary and the cost of using the amnesty provision on Chauncey Billups. The league’s other big-money juggernaut throwing its cash around that way irked some folks around the league a few hours before the Paul trade pushed Stern, Gilbert and whomever else over the top.

You don’t get to run a league this way. You don’t get to ratify a collective bargaining agreement that allows for a particular move and then quash such a move when it happens. The league should have let the Paul deal proceed, and now it has trapped itself in a situation where it must either let it pass on appeal or face any number of consequences — Paul bolting in free agency for nothing, the Hornets accepting a worse trade down the line and other stuff atop the chaos and bitterness already uncoiling throughout the league.




http://nba-point-forward.si.com/2011...into-disaster/

[T-Snell]

Report: Glen Davis traded to Orlando for Bass


At certain points, Glen Davis was considered a pretty solid free agent acquisition and a major part of the Celtics rotation. But in terms of money, he wasn't fitting. No, not because of his size, but because of the money he wanted.

The Celtics have decided to move on, trading him to Orlando for Brandon Bass in a sign-and-trade, according to Yahoo! Sports.

It's kind of an odd deal because it's hard to say what the Magic were trying to upgrade here, but Bass will definitely fit in well with the Celtics. He's a hard working player and someone with a good amount of offensive skill that never seemed to fit in to Stan Van Gundy's rotation for whatever reason. He can rebound and hit a little jumper, which are two things Davis did well. It'll probably just be Bass fits in at a cheaper price.

Davis will likely head to Orlando and start at power forward, and will probably be paid more than Bass. And he's not at all a better player. He's not a better defender, not a better shooter and it's up for debate if he's a better rebounder.

It's kind of a minor deal that will be lost in the shuffle of all this madness, but it's a curious one. The Celtics upgrade with a young player that likely just needs more opportunity, but the Magic have acquired an inconsistent tweener that is probably going to be paid too much.


http://eye-on-basketball.blogs.cbssp...48484/33773561

[LBJmvpFORlife]

Free Agency Open Thread

Every official transaction, all in one place.


The NBA is back! Free agency is the first step toward getting back on the court, and we’ve already seen a botched CP3-Lakers trade, Dwight Howard rumors swirling, and a dozen other agreements reached between teams and unrestricted players—all before the “official” start of the free agency period. That drops today, and while you can get the details on each individual story via the SLAM news feed, consider this the all-encompassing, streamlined forum for all things free agency. Below is a live list of every move, big or small, and we’ll be updating this as new breaks over the next few days. So follow along as we digest all the craziness, and as we inch closer to Christmas Day.

Update: Friday 2:20 p.m.

— Grant Hill re-signs with Phoenix Suns for $6.5 million, 1 year

— James Jones, Mario Chalmers re-sign with Miami Heat

— Boston Celtics traded Glen Davis to Orlando Magic for Brandon Bass

— Portland Trail Blazers G Brandon Roy retires

— Jonas Jerebko re-signs with Detroit Pistons for $16 million, 4 years

— Keyon Dooling traded to Boston Celtics for a second-round pick

— Mike Dunleavy Jr. signs with Milwaukee Bucks for $7.5 million, 2 years

— Caron Butler signs with Los Angeles Clippers for $24 million, 3 years

— Shannon Brown signs with Phoenix Suns for $3.5 million, 1 year

— Tayshaun Prince re-signs with Detroit Pistons for $27 million, 4 years

— Eddy Curry signs with Miami Heat

— Greg Oden re-signs with Portland Trail Blazers for $8.9 million, 1 year



http://www.slamonline.com/online/nba...y-open-thread/

[T-Snell]

Hornets, Lakers, Rockets resume Paul talks


The New Orleans Hornets, Houston Rockets and Los Angeles Lakers have resumed negotiations in an attempt to find a way to complete a blockbuster trade that would send Chris Paul to L.A., league sources told Yahoo! Sports.

“All three teams are engaged,” one source told Y! Sports. “Not sure if it will work.”

The resumption of talks comes less than 24 hours after the three teams agreed on a trade only to have NBA commissioner David Stern veto it. Stern released a statement on Friday saying he blocked the trade because the league-owned Hornets were “better served with Chris in a Hornets uniform than by the outcome of the terms of that trade.”

After Stern refused Friday morning to reconsider his stunning decision to nullify the trade, the Hornets were allowed to return to talks with the Rockets and Lakers. Talks were ongoing Friday afternoon, sources said.

Stern killed the Hornets’ trade of Paul after several owners complained about the league-owned team dealing the All-Star point guard to the Lakers, league 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 NBA took control of the Hornets ownership last December, and have been working to sell the franchise to a new group that will presumably keep it in New Orleans.

The trade between the Lakers, Hornets and Rockets had been consummated late Thursday afternoon, about the same time the league’s owners and players were completing their vote to ratify the new collective bargaining agreement – an agreement that Stern had repeatedly said would help restore the NBA’s competitive balance. League owners had watched last season as some of the game’s biggest stars left for larger markets. LeBron James and Chris Bosh joined Dwyane Wade and the Miami Heat, and Carmelo Anthony forced the Denver Nuggets to trade him to the New York Knicks.

Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert called the proposed trade a “travesty” in an email to Stern and said he didn’t know how the league could allow the deal to happen. The email, which was also sent to deputy commissioner Adam Silver and a handful of team owners and was obtained by Y! Sports, asked Stern to put the trade to a vote of the league’s 29 owners.

“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 had, and he wasn’t going to let Chris Paul dictate where he wanted to go.”

Before Stern intervened, the Lakers had reached an agreement to acquire Paul in a deal that would have cost them Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom, league sources told Yahoo! Sports. Under terms of the deal, the Lakers would have sent Gasol to the Rockets. The Hornets would have received Odom, Rockets guards Kevin Martin and Goran Dragic and forward Luis Scola, league sources said.

Houston had also agreed to send a 2012 first-round pick – previously obtained from the Knicks – to New Orleans as part of the package, a source said.

Hornets general manager Dell Demps had informed two of the other finalists for Paul on Thursday evening that he had a deal in place for Paul to go the Lakers, front-office sources said.

Demps was “disconsolate” over the heavy-handed move from the commissioner’s office, a source told Y! Sports. Demps considered resigning his job on Thursday, league sources said, and had to be talked out of it. The Hornets had scored a terrific deal for Paul, a trade that was lauded by some of Demps’ peers throughout the league. Officials involved in the trade talks said the league office was consulted throughout the negotiations, and there was never an indication Demps didn’t have the power to make a deal. In fact, several teams negotiating with New Orleans to get Paul asked the league office and were told Demps had full authority to execute a trade.

Stern listened to enraged owners on Thursday who insisted this trade went against the entire reason the owners pushed for the lockout, that nothing had changed, and yet it was Stern who made the extraordinary decision to cancel the deal. Demps tried to talk him out of it, league officials said, but Stern was absolute in his desire to kill the trade.

Paul had listed the Lakers as one of his preferred destinations, and it became a more clear choice for him on Thursday after the New York Knicks moved to the brink of completing a four-year, $58 million contract for free-agent center Tyson Chandler. The Knicks lost the salary-cap space they would’ve needed to sign Paul this summer, and the Lakers had been pushing hard to close a deal for Paul with Houston and New Orleans.

As one rival executive with strong ties to the league office said, “Stern cared about two things: selling that franchise for the best possible price and showing the players that they weren’t going to dictate where teams could trade them. But now, there’s no way that the league can allow Chris Paul to be traded at all; otherwise, Stern is basically deciding where one of the top players in the league is going versus having any fair process.”

Officials from New Orleans, Houston and Los Angeles were stunned Thursday night. The killed trade had ripple effects everywhere in free agency and potential trades, pushing the market into paralysis on the eve of training camps opening Friday.

“We were all told by the league he was a tradeable player, and now they’re saying that Dell doesn’t have the authority to make the trade?” said an NBA executive who had periodic talks with New Orleans throughout the process. “Now they’re saying that Dell is an idiot, that he can’t do his job. [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.

“How do the Lakers explain this to Odom? How does Houston deal with the guys it just tried to trade? Scola and Martin are going to be pissed at them, and who knows how long that takes to get over? Explain to me how the league kills this Pau Gasol deal, but allows Kwame Brown for Pau Gasol?

“To me, this makes the league feel like it’s rigged, that Stern just does whatever Stern wants to do. He’s messed up the competitive balance of this league a lot worse by killing the deal because you’ve completely destroyed the planning that New Orleans and Houston did and left them in shambles over this. I’ve never been so discouraged about this league, never so down.

“I mean, come on: Chris Paul is leaving New Orleans in 66 games. He’s gone. And what’s Dell Demps, and that franchise, going to have to show for it?”



http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news;_yl...ers_nba_120911

[LBJmvpFORlife]

Sources: Mavs targeting Samuel Dalembert

December, 10, 2011
DEC 10
11:51

By Tim MacMahon

The Mavericks are trying to acquire a tag-team partner for big man Brendan Haywood.

The pie-in-the-sky scenario is landing All-NBA center Dwight Howard, but the Mavs’ immediate goal is much more realistic. Sources told ESPN.com’s Marc Stein that the Mavs are attempting to land Samuel Dalembert with the trade exception they received in the Tyson Chandler sign-and-trade with the Knicks.

It would be a sign-and-trade deal with the Sacramento Kings. While it’s not immediately clear what the Kings would want in return, they are known to covet outgoing Mavs guard J.J. Barea. The Mavs hope to convince athletic, 6-foot-11 Dalembert to accept a lucrative one-year offer.

Dalembert averaged 8.1 points, 8.2 rebounds and 1.5 blocks in 24.2 minutes per game for the Kings last season, numbers that are very close to the norm for him during his nine-year career.

While the Mavs have permission to talk to Howard’s agent, it’s extremely unlikely that they’ll be able to make a deal for him even with the large trade exception as an asset. Acquiring Dalembert on a one-year deal would give the Mavs a solid, starting-caliber replacement for Chandler while allowing them to maintain enough cap space to be major bidders in 2012 free agency, when Howard and point guards Chris Paul and Deron Williams headline the market.

http://espn.go.com/blog/dallas/maver...medium=twitter

[Ljuba90]

New Chris Paul to Lakers trade submitted to NBA

The Lakers, Hornets and Rockets reached agreement on the framework of a revised trade sending Chris Paul to the Lakers Saturday, pending the resolution of some moving parts and approval by the commissioner's office, multiple sources told CBSSports.com.

Houston would still get Pau Gasol from the Lakers in the three-team swap, while the Rockets would send Luis Scola and Kevin Martin to the Hornets, as in the original version that was killed by commissioner David Stern in his role as final decision-maker on major personnel moves for the league-owned Hornets.

It wasn't immediately clear how the Hornets were satisfying the league directive to acquire young players and valuable draft picks in the deal, but one minor tweak that New Orleans GM Dell Demps was trying to add was the inclusion of second-year forward Devin Ebanks from the Lakers. By late afternoon, it appeared likely that the Lakers would keep Ebanks and that the additional young talent going to New Orleans would be coming from the Rockets, who are seeking to follow up their acquisition of Gasol by signing free-agent Nene to a four-year deal for $60-$64 million, sources said.

There were no indications that Andrew Bynum would be included in the new iteration of the trade, or that Emeka Okafor and the $41 million left on his contract would be going to the Lakers. While that substantial adjustment to the original deal terms might satisfy the league's objective to have Paul replaced in New Orleans by a combination of young talent and better financial books, it would also run counter to the Lakers' goal of trying to acquire Paul as a table-setter for a run at 2012 free agent center Dwight Howard.

UPDATE: While some observers were confused as to why the Lakers wouldn't seriously engage the Magic in trade discussions that would send Bynum and Gasol to Orlando for Howard and Hedo Turkoglu's poisonous contract, sources said the answer was simple: the Lakers want to try to position themselves to land both Paul and Howard. A person directly involved in the Howard sweepstakes confirmed to CBSSports.com a report by Yahoo Sports that Howard has requested a trade to the New Jersey Nets. Howard requested to be traded in two separate conversations with GM Otis Smith since Monday, the Orlando Sentinel reported.

However, a person involved in Howard's decision-making process maintained Saturday that the Lakers were by no means out of the picture -- and that, in fact, Howard views L.A. as a better fit for his off-court aspirations. The conflicting signals from Howard are similar to what Magic executives have experienced over the past year as the All-NBA center has frequently changed his mind about whether he wants to stay in Orlando or not.

The Magic, attempting to avoid the scenario that saw them lose franchise center Shaquille O'Neal as a free agent in 1996 and get nothing in return, gave Howard's agent, Dan Fegan, permission to speak with three teams about a potential trade: the Lakers, Nets and Mavericks.

As high as the stakes are for Orlando, they were equally high for New Jersey, which traded Derrick Favors, Devin Harris and two first-round picks last season for point guard Deron Williams without any assurances that Williams would still be with the team when it moves to a new arena in Brooklyn for the 2012-13 season. If Howard were traded elsewhere, and if Nene decided to join Gasol in Houston in the aftermath of a potential Paul trade, the Nets' efforts to surround Williams with enough talent to sign a long-term deal next summer would be on life support.

Though Howard clearly is the biggest prize in this game of musical chairs among future free agents, his future and the status Nene -- who also has close to a max offer on the table from New Jersey -- are on hold until the outcome of the Paul saga is determined. Stern must approve any transaction as monumental as a Paul trade not as commissioner, but as the final decision-maker for the Hornets in their absence of an owner since the league took over the franchise in 2010 from George Shinn.

The Paul talks were revived Friday afternoon after Stern took the stunning step of killing the deal in its previous form. The goal was to tweak the deal in a way that allowed New Orleans to come away with younger players and more draft picks, the directive issued by the commissioner's office after a trade that would've sent the Hornets three bonafide starters, a solid backup, and a mid-first-round pick was deemed not good enough.

There is no deadline, per se, to complete the deal. But the three teams want to reach a conclusion one way or another as early as Saturday to avoid any further awkwardness and wasted time in a training camp that already is shortened by the abrupt end to the 149-day lockout.

The deal consummated Thursday would've sent Paul to the Lakers, who would've Gasol to the Rockets and Lamar Odom to the Hornets. New Orleans also would've received Martin, Scola, Goran Dragic and a first-round pick from Houston -- a solid haul by Demps under the circumstances in the eyes of many of his fellow executives.

Paul, among the biggest stars and most electrifying guards in the league, has an early-termination option after the season and can become an unrestricted free agent July 1. He already has declined a contract extension with New Orleans, and it is a foregone conclusion that he would leave as a free agent with his preferred destination being the Knicks.

But given that the Knicks didn't have cap space to offer Paul a max deal next season even before solidifying their defense with the imminent addition of center Tyson Chandler, the consolation prize of joining the Lakers with the opportunity to sign a five-year, $100 million deal after the season certainly would be enticing to Paul.

Where the younger assets would come from was still being negotiated early Saturday, with potential candidates to go to New Orleans being Patrick Patterson, Courtney Lee and an assembly of draft picks, according to an executive briefed on the talks.

While the commissioner has veto authority over all trades, it is typically only invoked if rules were broken or the deal doesn't comply with salary cap rules. In this instance, the league office is involved because the NBA bought the Hornets from previous owner George Shinn, putting Stern in concert with appointed team governor Jac Sperling on all major personnel decisions.

Rival team executives and agents expressed doubts Friday about how Paul could be dealt to a team other than the Lakers after Stern's well publicized nixing of the original deal components. If Paul were traded, for example, to the Celtics, who initially pursued him with a trade centered around point guard Rajon Rondo, the league would be unable to explain why Paul could be traded to the Celtics and not the Lakers. The league office's role was not supposed to be to decide which teams the Hornetsd do business with, but to ensure that the "best interests of the Hornets" were satisfied, according to a statement from the NBA Friday.

If Demps were unable to trade Paul in the wake of Stern's trade denial, it would be difficult to comprehend how the Hornets' "best interests" would be satisfied by the star leaving as a free agent in July with the Hornets receiving nothing in return.

http://ken-berger.blogs.cbssports.co...38893/33780584