I try to stay out of the team-specific threads because they should be for fans of that team and they shouldn't have to put up with people who know less about their team and fan base, so no Lakers thread for me. But it's amazing to me how many people still don't understand the Chris Paul trade veto over there (and presumably elsewhere).
The trade was vetoed by the owners of the Hornets, not the league. Yes, the league owned the team, but they weren't acting in in an administrative capacity when they vetoed the trade, they were acting as the owners of the Hornets. Owners of sports teams vetoes personnel moves all the time. You don't have a right to be free of the whims of nutty rich owners on the other side of your team's trade offers, whether it's just one guy or a collection of 29 different people/families/investment groups.
If you want to complain, complain about the league taking ownership of one of its franchises in the first place. That's at least a reasonable complaint. But once it happens, they're just like any other team. If ownership decides it doesn't like a trade, there's no trade, end of story.
What you say is absolutely true as far as crazy owners vetoing personnel moves all the time. As a Laker fan what bothered me then (and now) was that it appeared that the league (acting as the "owner" of the team) nixed the deal after the GM approved it because other owners complained about the deal to Stern. Dan Gilbert's email to the commish in which he complained about the Lakers actually saving money and not paying luxury tax was galling, since the one of the main points of the CBA (supposedly) was to have teams cut costs and level the playing field between teams from different-sized markets, but he seemed to be acting as if the Lakers were supposed to overspend all the time in order for the small-market owners to get more cash in their pockets. I don't believe that Stern killed the deal for "basketball reasons" as he stated, but instead to appease a number of complaining owners.
Stern's personnel acumen netted the Hornicans Chris Kaman, Al-Farouq Aminu, Austin Rivers (taken with the 1st round pick NO got in the deal) and Eric Gordon (who has played 51 games in his two seasons in New Orleans), instead of Lamar Odom, Luis Scola, Goran Dragic, and Kevin Martin (and a first round pick which would have netted a player who couldn't have been worse than Rivers). While Gordon appeared to be the best singular asset in either deal, remember he was coming off consecutive seasons where he had he missed at least 20 games. Given the deal that Stern, as Hornets owner, approved, it isn't easy to see the vast difference in "basketball reasons" for killing the Lakers trade and approving the Clippers trade.
While Stern was technically within his rights to veto the trade as "owner" of New Orleans, I (and I'm sure many Laker fans out there) think he did only to satisfy #####ing owners like Gilbert, which meant he was acting more as commish than owner in that instance. So perhaps that is why Laker fans say the NBA as a whole nixed the deal instead of the NBA as the owners of the Hornets.
The landscape of the NBA would be very different right now, though perhaps Dwight would still be in Houston, as I could certainly have seen Morey turn Gasol into some assets that would land him big time players such as he has now, and perhaps Paul and Bryant would have butted heads and Paul would have decided to play elsewhere. I would have liked to have seen a star on the Lakers who wouldn't have immediately deferred to Kobe, though.
