Stern blames Rockets and Lakers...

Yeah, I saw that yesterday. Reminded me what a slippery Mafioso-like type he was.

I'm sure the other teams have moved on by now; Morey probably shook his head when he read this.

 

Stern still trying hard to be relevant...

 

The BS part NBC fails to call him on is this: when the league bought the Hornets, they appointed Jac Sperling to be the overseer for the league so that they could erect a firewall between the two entities and avoid any appearance that the league office might exploit the team to achieve objectives of the league. Great plan. If someone was going to nix that deal as the owner representative, it should have been Sperling. Stern just ran roughshod over the firewall to kill the deal.

 

LMAO, he said the trade with the Clippers was good because the Hornets sucked so bad after they could draft Anthony Davis. I wonder what would have happened if they didn't magically get the first pick, Stern.

That pick (Lamb) and Martin ended up being key pieces in the Harden trade. So it's all good. Lakers fans end up losing on Chris Paul, so it's even better!

You can tell he's lying though, I doubt Stern actually did anything for the team and he let the GM handle everything. The NBA owned the Hornets, and he decided to step in after a few owners started crying about the super team clause in the CBA.

 

In hindsight, 100% happy he vetoed the trade. Without Stern we would never have gotten Harden.

So glad now that we didn't get Gasol and signed soon to be injury prone Nene (who eventually went to the Wizards).

God works in mysterious ways

 

thats a little stern from stern

 

This 100%
But still, **** David Stern.

 

Larry Coon set the record straight on the "trade":

"There's still tons of misinformation floating around about this one. A trade never got submitted to the league office. Demps agreed with other GMs on the trade, but the acting owner of the team said no. Likewise, the Lakers once nearly traded James Worthy for a mediocre-by-comparison replacement of Worthy, and a drug-hazed center. Fortunately, the Lakers owner said "no" (with a little persuasion) and the trade never happened. Should Dallas have gotten upset about the veto? Of course not -- the trade never got to the stage where it was real (i.e, to scheduling a trade call) because it never reached the stage where the responsible parties for each team were okay with it.

You could correctly call out the conflict of interest for Stern, and I don't disagree with you. He had Joc Sperling as the president of the team, but Sperling's job was to find a buyer for the team, not to oversee Basketball Ops. So that made it up to Stern. He could have avoided the COI by appointing someone else over Basketball Ops so he stayed at arm's length, but he didn't -- so it was his final call (as owner) and he said no. COI notwithstanding, it was a trade that never made it to the stage of being real, just like hundreds of other trades have never made it that far.

And besides-which, everybody went back to the table after that, and it was the Lakers who wouldn't budge. They could have had Chris Paul anyway by changing the trade, but they stepped away from the table."

 

I thought demps was promised autonomy. Should Morey hve known he was effectively negotiating with stern?

 

I call BS on Coon. Stern nixing that deal was dirty and highly inappropriate. He nixed it as 'acting owner' not as league commissioner, but he wasn't the 'acting owner' until this trade came up. It didn't come to anything in the end because the real owners closed ranks -- like they always do, it's a privately-owned business after all -- and the union was too dysfunctional and depleted to object. Stern was able to do it because his bosses let him do it. But for him to come and try to argue to me that he was on the up-and-up and it's only because the Lakers and Rockets badmouthed him that I have a negative impression of how he handled it -- no. I don't accept that. It was dirty. He gave the management team of the Hornets autonomy to make basketball decisions, and they made a big to-do about it too, so that no one would think there was anything improper. It was the exact right thing to do too. But when the chips were down and a rich and successful franchise was looking like the main beneficiary of the arrangement, the other owners were quick to throw all that appearance-of-propriety into the dumpster to make sure it didn't happen. They changed the rules when the outcome didn't suit them. Lakers have every right to be upset about it. Rockets too, though I doubt they are anymore. I won't accept these arguments that Stern was just doing what all owners do with major trades. It's revisionist history. Stern, Gilbert, and the other owners were dirty.

 

Here's an article from back then that echoes a lot of how I remember it going down: http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/blog/ba...ails-to-observe-its-own-rules?urn=nba,wp11582

 

Most GM's have autonomy up until they take it to their owner for approval. Owners nixing potential deals is nothing new.

 

Owners rejecting deals at advanced stages isn't uncommon.

 

I don't call BS on Coon when he's discussing Laker matters or cap issues. He's highly reliable when it comes to both.

 

Stern is a dirty weasel. But sometimes a dirty weasel might unintentionally do some dirty things that would save you from killing yourself.

 

I think it was a perfectly good move to cancel the trade because the Hornets were absolutely screwed in that deal and were getting a smoking pile of garbage. They basically woulda been what we were at that point: annually competing for the 8th seed and failing just by that much and getting a crappie pick whilst not making the playoffs. They needed to be bad to have a shot at AD. Who would wanna buy a team in Limbo?