LONG BEFORE the Thunder touched down in Oklahoma City, before KD, Brodie, and the Beard ever donned the blue and orange, it was Chris Paul who was the face of OKC sports.
Just two months after the New Orleans Hornets made the 6-1, All-American point guard from Wake Forest the fourth overall pick in the draft, Hurricane Katrina swept through New Orleans and the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, causing catastrophic damage and mass casualties.
“I’ll never forget being home in North Carolina and waking up and looking at the news,” Paul recalled in an interview on the Knuckleheads podcast in 2020. “We ended up relocating to Oklahoma for two years.”
Chance, misfortune and—some might argue—fate opened the door for a city that nobody thought could support something that otherwise seemed so out of their league.
“It is one thing to sort of dream and hope for major league status, but we really didn’t do a whole lot of that,” said Berry Tramel, a long-time sports columnist for The Oklahoman. “It just sort of landed in our laps.”
“WE WERE ALL HOMELESS.”
Michael Thompson, the former New Orleans Hornets Director of Corporate Communications, remembers the time
