BY: ALEX BOGACH

I’m going to write this very slowly to make sure that by the time this gets posted it will still be relevant. With the way things are going so far, I wouldn’t be stunned to see Chris Paul in New York, Tyson Chandler back with the Mavericks and LeBron taking his talents to Beskitas.

I expected this week was going to be wild. I expected it to be jam packed with player movement—and not just any player movement—but perhaps star-studded player movement, including Chris Paul and Dwight Howard.

Here’s the briefing:

After Tyson Chandler committed to the Knicks, Chauncey Billups was getting amnestied, Caron Butler committed to the Clippers and Tayshaun Prince re-signed with the Pistons, I thought today was pretty damn exciting. And with tomorrow being the first day that NBA teams can officially hold training camp and begin trading and signing players, I thought this was going to be a great preview for the week ahead.

As it turns out, we didn’t even scratch the surface of how crazy this week is about to get.

In the late afternoon, a Chris Paul to LA rumor began to gain some steam. And then within a flash, it was a reality. This wasn’t a rumor anymore. It was being reported by ESPN on their front page, ESPNLA had Albert Pujols and Paul on their frontpage in disbelief, NBATV’s David Aldridge was discussing its implication while Facebook updates were screaming at the NBA to stop becoming a top heavy, superstar driven league.

And guess what? The NBA answered your calls.

Because the Hornets are owned by the NBA, once news started to trickle out, the owners immediately stepped in and blocked the trade to the Lakers. The owners told David Stern that Dell Demps (the Hornets’ GM) had no right to trade Paul—the team’s greatest asset.

Stern had insisted over and over again that the Hornets’ basketball decision-making was autonomous. That Demps could make any basketball decision he wanted with full support from the league.

Well, because every NBA owner owns 1/29th of the Hornets, they put enough pressure on Stern to block the trade. If it were MLSE blocking a move by Bryan Colangelo, it would make perfect sense, but because it’s the league (run by all the owners) it draws some suspicion.

Let me simplify it for you. Every NBA owner said: “We don’t want Paul on the Lakers”. And just like that—it happened.

In case you were wondering, this is unprecedented. Completely and utterly unprecedented. Can Paul sue the league? Can the league do this? Will the owners veto every single Chris Paul trade? How does Paul show up to training camp tomorrow and run sets with the team? Is this a joke?

[Note: I’m seeing a lot of bashing on David Stern and he should take the blame for not planning for a situation like this properly, but this is entirely the work of the rest of the owners who saw the Lakers get Paul and made a knee jerk, emotional decision to not allow it to happen. So yes, Stern’s fault, owners’ veto]

Weirdest part of it all is that the trade was pretty fair. According to recent reports, other GMs are applauding Demps for the deal. The Lakers would have ended up with an empty front-court (post trade frontcourt: Andrew Bynum and……..Derrick Caracter) and a long shot to get Dwight Howard.

I don’t even know what to say at this point. As time goes on we’ll learn more about what this means for the teams going forward, but one thing for certain is that the free agency bonanza we all predicted this week just got turned upside down.

You can complain all you want about the league not fixing overpaid players, not caring about competitive balance, not answering to calls for parity or being too greedy in the lockout—but one thing that should have been figured out is a situation like this. For the league, it’s an embarrassment on a year overflowing with blemishes.

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