Pau Gasol Trade: Appeal Won't Reverse League's Misguided Chris Paul Veto

NBA commissioner David Stern vetoed a three-team trade last night that would have sent Pau Gasol to the Houston Rockets as part of the Hornets’ efforts to get something back for disgruntled Chris Paul. The teams involved in the deal, however, are looking to go down fighting.

As reported by Yahoo! Sports, both the Hornets and Rockets have appealed to the league office in an effort to convince Stern to reverse his decision. Several NBA executives, however, told the site that they don’t believe the appeal will gain any traction with the commissioner.

One unnamed exec was quoted as saying, “Stern cared about two things: selling [the Hornets] for the best possible price and showing the players that they weren’t going to dictate where teams could trade them.”

Another went even further, declaring “[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.”

Stern has gone to plenty of trouble this offseason to earn that bleak image of his behavior. The entire lockout came off as Stern’s effort to legislate his vision of how the league should work, reality be [expletive]d.

That’s not to say that fans, or the league, particularly benefit from stars like Paul pulling strings to get the trades they want. Still, the solution is not for the commissioner to decide unilaterally that only trades he likes should be permitted to happen.

Stern is too pig-headed to admit his mistake now, but the notion that the league should be making trade decisions—even for teams it temporarily owns—is a ludicrous premise that should never have been broached in the first place.