NBA Rumors: Chauncey Billups Has Every Right To Be Unhappy with Chris Paul Talk

At 35 years of age, New York Knicks point guard Chauncey Billups knows success. He was a big part of leading the Detroit Pistons to an NBA Championship in 2004, winning NBA Finals MVP in the process.

A veteran of 15 seasons in the league, Billups also knows change. If anyone understands that professional basketball is a business, it's Billups, who has been traded five times.

That number could be six if the New York Knicks have their way and can facilitate a trade with the New Orleans Hornets for Chris Paul. Any Paul trade would certainly include the expiring contract of Billups. While Billups certainly understands how things work in the NBA, he certainly doesn't have to be happy about it.

Billups wouldn't be happy about a trade from the Knicks and he has every right to be upset.

Here's a guy playing out the rest of his career in his hometown of Denver as the final years of his NBA career winds down.

Instead, he gets dealt to New York as part of the Carmelo Anthony deal, but in the end that's fine because it gave him one more opportunity to win. At Billups' age, all that's really left in his career is winning another championship.

But in all of the talk about Paul, Billups seems to be a guy that's easy to discard. What people fail to realize is that Paul isn't the Knicks point guard right now, Billups is. How he plays in 2011-12 will have a big impact on how far this Knicks team will go.

Billups is more than capable of leading this Knicks team for the short term, yet no one is talking about him.

While he's the ultimate professional and wouldn't speak out negatively, you can understand if he is not too happy about the Paul rumors.

Billups has accomplished great things in this league and deserves to be more than a throw-in as part of a trade for a younger superstar.

While the Paul rumors may be nice to think about, the reality is that he's not going to be the Knicks point guard this season.

That job belongs to Billups.