The Deal Is Off!? CP3 Isn’t a Laker Yet

The Los Angeles Lakers have agreed to a trade in which they will obtain New Orleans Hornets point guard Chris Paul for Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom, sources tell ESPN.com's Marc Stein. The Houston Rockets are the third team in the trade and will obtain Gasol from the Hornets in return for Luis Scola, Kevin Martin, Goran Dragic, and a 2012 first-round pick that Houston received from the New York Knicks, sources said.

Sources said that a group of NBA owners, assembled in New York for the ratification of the league's new labor pact with the players, protested vigorously that the league-owned Hornets were trading Paul to the star-studded Lakers and convinced NBA commissioner David Stern to intervene.

"The deal is off," one source told ESPN.com.

In Paul, the Lakers will obtain an All-Star and gold medal-winning U.S. Olympic Team member who has averaged 37.1 minutes, 18.7 points and 9.9 assists a game in his six NBA seasons. Paul can opt out of his current contract with New Orleans after this season, and the Hornets have been fielding trade offers in an effort to acquire new players for the star guard rather than letting him walk in free agency. Paul averaged 15.8 points and 9.8 assists last season.

The Rockets, who lost Yao Ming to retirement, coveted the 7-foot Gasol, while the Hornets didn't, a source told ESPN The Magazine's Ric Bucher. Furthermore, the Rockets have the rebuilding pieces Hornets general manager Dell Demps wanted in a trade for Paul -- namely, young talent such as Martin and the 2012 first-round draft pick, the source told Bucher.

Speaking earlier Thursday, Hornets president Hugh Weber said the franchise has been preparing for months for the possibility that Paul would resist signing an extension in New Orleans, a move that would all but force a trade. "We've been preparing for this moment for over a year and it's not like we were surprised or caught flat-footed," Weber said. "This is not a surprise. This is not something where we've been sitting around waiting to see what would happen. We've been managing this and taking control of the situation as best we can and we're going to have a team that we believe achieves that objective of making this community proud."

While he never said publicly that he wanted to play in a larger market, he did say before last season that he wants to play for a team that has a chance to contend for a title right away -- something he should get when he joins Kobe Bryant and the Lakers.
The Hornets have been owned by the NBA since last December, when the league bought the club from founder George Shinn.
Despite the lockout and uncertainty over Paul's future, fan support has been building in New Orleans, where the team has advertised their season-ticket drive as an effort to lure a permanent local buyer who is committed to keeping the team in Louisiana. The Hornets have increased their season ticket base from a little more than 6,000 last season to just over 10,019 as of Thursday afternoon.

Owners and players ratified a new collective bargaining agreement Thursday, the final step to ending the five-month lockout and paving the way for training camps and free agency to open Friday. There was hope in small markets like New Orleans that after the lockout it would be easier for teams to hold on to their biggest stars. However, that apparently is not the case.If this deal is approved one of the NBA's biggest stars from the league-owned small-market Hornets will be moving to one of the NBA's largest, richest markets.

By David Aldridge