Why the NBA killed the Chris Paul trade to Lakers and preferred the Clippers

By the afternoon of Dec. 8, 2011, the NBA was just emerging from a 161-day lockout, with months of negotiations between team owners and players producing a ratified, 10-year collective bargaining agreement.

In hindsight, it wasn't even the most contentious deal discussed that day.

Acting in its role as the interim owner of the New Orleans Hornets, the NBA that night did not allow a three-team trade the Hornets had constructed that would have sent Chris Paul, the seventh-year All-Star already considered one of the game's greatest point guards, to a Lakers franchise that had won two of the previous three titles. The vetoed trade set off a six-day span that changed the trajectories of the Lakers and the Clippers — one L.A. team that believed it had acquired Paul, and the other that ultimately landed him.

Ten years later, the moment remains a controversial, intertwined chapter in the histories of both L.A. franchises and the league — one not everyone cares to revisit.

Then-New Orleans general manager Dell Demps, former Clippers coach Vinny Del Negro and Paul, through the Phoenix Suns, declined to be interviewed. More than a dozen people interviewed who lived through those fraught six days remember it as former Hornets guard Jarrett Jack.

"It was," he said, "a roller coaster."

Part One, A Done Deal Undone: "The press release was completely ready to go"

In 2010, as Paul was believed to be looking for a way out of New Orleans, then-Lakers coach Phil Jackson questioned how the NBA would handle a trade for Paul in its authority as the team's de facto owner. "Somebody's going to have to make a very non-judgmental decision on that part that's not going to irritate anybody else in this league," Jackson said. "I don't know how they're going to do that."

That moment of truth arrived as the