Chris Paul Lakers: Death of CP3 Trade Best Thing for NBA

In the beginning, the trade that would have sent Chris Paul to the Los Angeles Lakers was alive.

But now, it is dead.

Such is the word around the campfire. Yahoo! Sports writer Adrian Wojnarowski, who was the first to break the news that the New Orleans Hornets had agreed to trade Paul to the Lakers, is reporting that the deal is now dead.

And according to Wojnarowski, it was the NBA that killed it:

In a subsequent tweet, Wojnarowski elaborated that the NBA had to kill the trade because it was backed into a corner by its owners:

So as suddenly as it appeared, there it goes. It was fun while it lasted.

Yet the question remains: What the heck is going on?

Honestly, it's complicated. But like Wojnarowski said, this trade would have looked bad for the NBA. The Lakers already have a reputation for using other teams as their personal farm systems and acquiring Paul would have further cemented that reputation.

To boot, it doesn't help that the Hornets are owned by the NBA. Had this trade gone through, it would have been way too easy for people to insinuate that the NBA was clearly in league with the Lakers and that it made the trade because it was good for business.

As for how the lockout entered into the picture, Wojnarowski explained that in a full report:

"

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.

"

In other words, had this trade actually come to fruition, it would have been apparent that the lockout had solved nothing.

Seeing as how the lockout lasted nearly five months and ate a good portion of the season, that would have been an absolute PR disaster.

Make no mistake, that's not something the NBA can risk right now. Not now, and hopefully not later.

Stern stepping in and killing this trade doesn't look good either. But on the bright side, one of the NBA's biggest stars is staying on a team that needs a star and a message has been sent that the Lakers can't do whatever the heck they want whenever they get the notion.

Is this to say that everybody wins? Not really. The Lakers are missing out on a premiere point guard and the Hornets are missing out on a package of players they could have built around. The NBA, meanwhile, looks like a collection of buffoons.

But hey, at least the NBA doesn't look crooked.