The Clippers are relevant, the Hornets can rebuild with Chris Paul trade

The Hornets traded Chris Paul to the Clippers for three players and a first-round pick. (Derick E. Hingle/US PRESSWIRE)

The Clippers, the league’s punchline, have acquired Chris Paul and two second-round picks for (deep breath) Chris Kaman, Eric Gordon, Al-Farouq Aminu and the Timberwolves’ unprotected first-round pick in 2012. This is a better deal for the Hornets, in basketball terms, than the three-team monster involving the Lakers and Rockets that the NBA blocked last week. And though the Clippers are parting with a bounty in exchange for the Point God, they managed to hang on to Eric Bledsoe and their own 2012 first-round pick — assets the league reportedly sought this week. Los Angeles, as is, will be in the mix for one of the Western Conference’s last three playoff spots. If the Clippers do make the playoffs, their pick is headed to Boston, which acquired it subject to top-10 protection. A mid first-rounder is a small, extra price to pay for Paul, even in a loaded draft.

Let’s put aside the heavy-handed Lakers veto and the craziness of the entire situation to talk basketball. This is a fair trade, and every fair trade brings caveats:

• Gordon is probably going to be the best shooting guard in the league in three or four seasons, or whenever Dwyane Wade begins showing his age. Gordon finished last season with a very good Player Efficiency Rating of 18.5 — near All-Star-level — but that under-sells how great he was. In December and January, before a wrist injury derailed his season, Gordon averaged 25 points and four assists, shot 48 percent from the floor and nearly 44 percent from three-point range, got to the free-throw line six times per game and became an elite pick-and-roll ball-handler. He is a huge loss.

• The precise state of Paul’s less-than-100 percent left knee is somewhat of an unknown, and there are folks around the league who are worried that the Clippers — and the rest of us Paul optimists — are putting too much stake in one six-game playoff series, against the Lakers last season, in which Paul looked like himself again. As Justin Havens pointed out at ESPN.com on Wednesday, in 2007-08 and 2008-09, the seasons right before Paul’s knee injury, he wasn’t just the best point guard in the league; he was putting up some of the best numbers in the history of the NBA, for any position. His PERs for those seasons — 28.3 and 30, respectively — put him in territory only a half-dozen or so guys have ever touched.In the two years since tearing the meniscus cartilage in his left knee, Paul’s numbers across the board have sunk to mere All-Star levels. He has been as accurate as ever from the floor — and even better from three-point range — but he shoots less than he used to, assists on fewer of his team’s baskets and has generally looked like a guy saving his energy.

Then the playoffs came, and Paul sliced through the Lakers, turning Kobe Bryant into the clear second-best player on the floor and posting his peak numbers again. Was it a sign that the real Paul is still there, ready to emerge when it counts? Or would Paul’s play have fallen back again had New Orleans advanced? That chunk of cartilage is gone, meaning Paul will likely face some of the same bone-on-bone contact and degeneration in one knee that Brandon Roy suffered, in a more severe form, in both his knees.

• There is the matter, of course, of Paul’s contract status. He has reportedly agreed to opt in for 2012-13, meaning the Clippers have two full seasons in which to persuade him to re-sign long term. Under the terms of the new collective bargaining agreement, they will be the only team able to offer Paul a five-year deal with the maximum-level 7.5 percent annual raises, worth a little more than $100 million total. Rivals will have to settle for a four-year deal with 4.5 percent raises, worth about $75 million, and while Paul could bolt and make up some of the difference on his next contract, leaving the Clippers would still cost him a few million.

THOMSEN: Credit Stern for brokering best deal for Hornets

We’re done with the caveats. The Clippers just acquired Chris Paul, the league’s greatest point guard, and they got him for a single draft pick, an expiring contract (Kaman), a small forward who might turn into a league-average starter (Aminu) and a shooting guard who thrived last season as a ball-handler — a responsibility Gordon would have largely forfeited with Paul around.

Blake Griffin, one of the league’s top pick-and-roll threats without an above-average point guard, now gets to catch passes from the best guy in the league. And when Griffin hones his jumper, Paul will be able to run pick-and-rolls with DeAndre Jordan and have his choice: lob to Jordan for a dunk, or, if the defense collapse there, kick out to Griffin for a wide-open jumper or a drive.

Paul coaxed a league-average offense last season out of Emeka Okafor, David West (until his knee injury), Trevor Ariza and Marco Belinelli. He made Jason Smith look like an elite bench player for a brief, shining moment. He had the Hornets, without West, pushing the defending champion Lakers harder than any of us expected.

Blake Griffin now has one of the best point guards in the game tossing him lobs. (AP)

Can you imagine what this guy is going to do with Griffin? Yes, the roster has issues; the Clippers now have approximately 17 point guards, one cold-shooting combo guard (Randy Foye) and zero “true” shooting guards. There is no real veteran backup on hand for either Griffin or Jordan. The Clippers will rectify some of this in the coming days via trade, and Chauncey Billups, if the Clips don’t waive him, can work fine off the ball. You get Paul, and you deal with this other stuff later. If Paul is healthy, he’s a transformational player, and if the Clippers can’t persuade him to stay after two years in Los Angeles with Griffin, then perhaps they couldn’t have persuaded the Gordon/Griffin duo to stay, either.

It would have been nice to see the Paul/Gordon/Griffin trio in action, and Paul is smart and unselfish enough that he would have found a workable balance with Gordon — an elite shooter who can also create with the ball. Still, it’s fair to ask about diminishing returns when a team pays max-level salaries to two perimeter guys with overlapping skill sets, especially when it already has an interior player worthy of the same salary. The Clippers may ultimately be better off — or nearly as well off — spending Gordon’s money on complementary pieces, and that’s before you factor in the $10.75 million they’ll be paying Jordan every season.

The Clippers might have been able to chase Paul in free agency, but cap space was tight following the Jordan deal, and free agency does not offer the sort of certainty they get here. This is a good deal.

And for the Hornets, it’s a better one than the three-teamer that would have landed them Kevin Martin, Luis Scola, Lamar Odom, Goran Dragic and a first-round pick. Folks went out of their way to celebrate that deal, and it became over-celebrated in the rush to condemn commissioner David Stern’s shocking veto. The Martin/Scola/Odom trio, combined with the Hornets’ holdovers, would likely have carried the team to a bottom playoff seed; the Hornets now look like a lottery team. But that’s probably better for the Hornets’ future, and the initial deal did not bring a single under-26 blue-chipper. Perhaps the Hornets could have moved one of those vets for draft picks and other assets, but acquiring Gordon skips the middle man and provides an immediate cornerstone.

It also gives the Hornets financial flexibility. The team has only about $26.2 million in committed salary for next season, though that doesn’t include Gordon’s coming extension and salary for future draft picks. Martin, Scola and Odom would have made nearly that much in guaranteed money themselves next season, and Scola’s deal runs through 2014-15 — when he’ll be 35. The rebuild is underway in earnest, and it is off to a decent start.

The NBA will claim some vindication from this, but there is less to be had than the league might like. Stern will go to his grave using the “basketball reasons” logic for voiding the initial Lakers/Rockets deal, and he’ll consistently point out, as he did Wednesday night, that he received Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert’s email pushing the veto hours after the commissioner had already made the call to nix the trade. Stern will always claim, in other words, that he was acting like any other owner, even though he had given the Hornets’ management  assurances he would never meddle that way.

Stern’s back-tracking on those assurances, plus later pro-veto comments from Gilbert, Michael Jordan and Mark Cuban, stain this deal in a way the spin can never erase. The Rockets/Lakers deal wasn’t a home run for the Hornets, but it wasn’t unfair, either. The Lakers, in particular, were taking a huge gamble in dealing two-thirds of their front-line rotation, even if doing so left them the one chip (Andrew Bynum) that might work as the center of a future Dwight Howard deal. To void the deal behind vague reasoning, amid the ratification of a new CBA that did little to deter the movement of stars, looked bad and smacked of an attempt by the owners to get what they couldn’t in the labor negotiations.

And whatever the motives, the unexpected veto spread collateral damage across the league. Odom is now gone, offended by his near inclusion in the trade; his departure to Dallas leaves the Lakers with a thin front line and marks them a second-tier contender in the West. Houston, so close to acquiring Pau Gasol and with its sights set on Nene, has nothing to show for its offseason other than new competition for a playoff spot. The ripples extend further, to Boston and Indiana, Dallas  and Denver, and other NBA cities.

But that’s over now, and we get to watch Paul toss lobs to Griffin. The Clippers win, the Hornets win and the NBA will hope we all forget any of this ever happened.