Chris Paul Deal: NBA Ownership and Their Second Massive Air Ball

These days, it's looking more and more like the people running the asylum we call the NBA are better suited to be inmates. A series of offseason debacles has taken the owners and officials of this league—no public darlings to begin with—and shoved them into the public eye in just about the most damaging fashion possible.

First of all, they were the deciding party in locking out the players, so their saga started on a particularly down note publicity-wise. Even during the lockout, however, most fans hoped that the owners would recapture some form of control over player movement, to prevent the creation of more super-mega-monster-teams.

So the owners were not all-the-way bad guys yet; many fans were counting on them to affect an outcome that remotely justified a five-month labor stoppage. Indeed, had the lockout resulted in a more moderate league-wide model, they might have saved some serious face.

Of course, that didn't happen. The new CBA basically gave us the amnesty clause and not much else. No hard cap, luxury tax hike or even franchise tag...so the NBA came out of the lockout still very much at the mercy of superstar agendas and big-market drawing power.

This means one thing: The last five months were for nothing. We just lost 16 games (and gallons of sweat) so the NBA could remain just as damaged as it was. Plus, the way it went down makes the owners look as though they were bluffing the whole way.

Without getting into details, essentially all the players had to do was decertify the union and bring in some legal heavy-hitters, and the months-long brick wall that was NBA ownership came crumbling down. It certainly appears they were beaten at a very ill-advised game.

So, in this writer's opinion, this was their first and most massive misstep: not so much going into a lockout, but going into a high-stakes game of chicken with empty holsters, more than prepared to deprive the fans of basketball (not to mention deprive countless families of revenue) for an entire season.

In retrospect, it comes off as a giant middle finger to all parties involved that the owners apparently saw nothing wrong with imposing on them the high cost of betting the house on a long shot. The "NBA Cares" campaign feels downright sarcastic at this point, doesn't it?

Now, fast-forward a week or two and the next biggest story of this offseason comes along, starring what are rapidly becoming the usual suspects. League ownership, it has just been reported, have killed a three-team deal that would have sent Chris Paul to the Lakers and frankly, saved Hornets fans a great deal of grief.

At this point, you're going to have people wondering aloud whether the current degradation of the NBA is a deliberate endeavor...

It may be said that the NBA was doing its duty as owner of the Hornets, to protect them from the damage of a bad return. However, the team could have landed a very interesting package of players for Paul—they might even have pulled a Denver and gotten better—and the feeling is that if this trade wasn't apt to be considered fair, no deal realistically could.

What this means is the league has taken it upon itself to make Chris Paul untradable. With David Stern there to stonewall even the best trade the Hornets can arrange, they're all but guaranteed to lose Paul for nothing at the end of the season. This is not particularly sound management...

What else could the league's motivation possibly be? Was someone particularly bitter about watching what they might call another power move, after having failed rather miserably to do anything about them? Was this less about the Hornets than it was about the Lakers? Was it the idea of a super-backcourt being formed before the steam was even done leaving the boardroom?

More disturbingly, is it possible someone in the league offices is doing this solely as a token flexing of what little muscle they have left over this exodus of big names to big markets? Insecurity, anyone?

Oh yes, we've trodden into personal territory, because there is absolutely nothing professional about this. I won't be the first person to call this an underhanded move. It makes one suspect this mega-corporation might be run less by business sense than by character flaws.

Even in its worst-case scenario, the ramifications of this would-be Chris Paul deal would normally—i.e. up until now—never have been seen as grounds for league intervention.

Sure, this bears the veneer of a franchise-level move rather than by the body of the league, but the distinction is moot considering we really don't know how much regard it was given by Stern and Company.

We could be staring at a pretty serious conflict of interests...

Despite the historic popularity of bashing wealthy team owners and special interests, we as fans have always operated with a sense that the league was in marginally competent hands...disagreeable, yes, but professional.

At the very least, someone you could turn your back on.

The more we wait for the 2011-12 season to begin, the more reasons we're being given to reconsider this assumption...and the more we realize we have much more to fear going forward than just big-name agendas.

The scary part is that the folks in charge are apparently no longer all that willing to keep themselves sufficiently in check to maintain the illusion of good business. It's almost as if they're burned out on PR after five months of media damage control, and have stopped caring—for the moment, at least—how bad they make themselves look. 

If this is so, then we have nowhere to go from here but down. For now, the league has put the kibosh on any legitimate threat to the Goliath that is Miami. Once again, nowhere but down.