I’ve had some time to think, and I’m much less incensed about this whole situation. Owners veto trades all the time, the weird part is how in this case it was David Stern to do it. He holds role as the league commissioner but also as acting Hornets owner, in this situation he was acting as the Hornets owner. But I’m going to post it anyway because I wrote almost 2,000 words.

It also appears that an altered version of this trade will get pushed through, which I wrote near the end.

Life is unpredictable. We walk around every day and we could get hit by a car, or we could be diagnosed with cancer or we could win the lottery. We never know what to expect from our lives. Sports are different. They’re unpredictable in a way—a ball can take a weird bounce, a guy can miss the easiest routine layup in the world. Every once in awhile during a basketball game my jumpshot will just feel ‘right’. Each shot I take feels like it’s going to go in. I can’t predict when this will happen, but it’s awesome when it does. But anything unpredictable that happens in sports happens within a system or set of rules. We can count on five guys playing against five guys in every single NBA game. We know you can’t dribble, pick up your dribble and then dribble again. That’s a double dribble and it is against the rules. We can also count on the referees blowing their whistle to stop play when that happens, because it is against the rules. The other team will get the ball. There are outcomes built into every situation.

This structure is built into how professional teams operate as well. In the NBA there is a salary cap, and rules about what type of contracts a player can sign. If a trade fits into all the rules, it goes through, no questions asked. Sports aren’t a matter of arbitrary judgements. They are a test of who can perform the best within a set of constraints.

The NBA broke their own rules yesterday, and not in a small way. David Stern vetoed a trade of the league’s best point guard, Chris Paul, to one of the league’s most successful teams, the Lakers. The trade was legal under the agreed to collective bargaining agreement. All teams general managers signed off on it.

It wasn’t even a very lopsided trade. Anytime you’re sending out one of the best players in the NBA, you aren’t getting equal value in return—probably not matter what. But Dell Demps, the Hornets GM, set up a nice trade for his team. They were getting Lamar Odom, Kevin Martin, Luis Scola, Goran Dragic and a first round pick. There are some very good, if aging players there. The Hornets would have remained competitive and probably would have slowly traded each of those players for younger assets. It’s like when you have a $100 bill and no stores will take it until you finally find a place that will break it up into twenties for you that are easier to spend.

Clearly you can’t say it was a bad trade for the Lakers. They were getting one of the league’s top five players. That’s a good trade for you. That said, it was opening up a gaping hole at power forward for them. I’m not sure who would have started there for the Lakers had they sent out Pau Gasol and Lamar Odom. For the Rockets, it was weird. Gasol is good, but I don’t know if he’s better than Dragic, Scola, Martin and a first round pick combined, and yes I realize they were opening up some cap space as well.

So you have a fair enough trade and David Stern vetoes it. For alleged basketball reasons. But that’s not really why. He vetoed it because the NBA owns the Hornets and this hurts their value significantly. Each of the other NBA owners has a 1/29 stake in the franchise, so they’re mad about that and they’re mad that the Lakers are getting one of the best players in the NBA. This doesn’t get vetoed if Paul was traded to the Bucks or the Bobcats. And so the veto comes off as arbitrary and unfair. Again, the trade was legal and fair. Some other owners and Stern didn’t like it. But they JUST signed off on a new set of rules that allowed this trade. Because of sour grapes, the league introduced an element of chaos into a rigid system.

Now, it’s probable something like this won’t happen again and an escalation argument is a tired one to make but there is suddenly a seed of doubt in everyone’s minds. Fans, owners and players all will have this in the back of their mind. The league lost so much credibility by making a decision that breaks their own rules, in a world that relies on rules. If you can’t trust the league to follow them, well why do you believe in the NBA? Isn’t there now a (very vague) sense that anything can happen? I hate hate to escalate this to the most dramatic place, but don’t you think there is someone out there worrying that the NBA is working behind the scenes to throw games for certain teams or create scenarios that are more beneficial to the league? The point is that SOMEBODY is worried about that exact scenario because of the vetoed trade yesterday. Other people are worried about other, less dramatic, scenarios. The seed of doubt has been planted. Chaos was introduced into a system with rules that shouldn’t have any.

Vetoing that trade was a really bad decision. As a lifelong Blazer fan, I’ve hated the Lakers since I’ve been aware of the Lakers. I’ve hated the Lakers more than any other sports team since the 99-00 playoffs. You guys know what I’m talking about. And despite that, despite the fact that if the Lakers got Chris Paul without giving up Andrew Bynum then it was probably just a matter of time until they got Dwight Howard as well. Despite the fact that they were about to become an absolutely overwhelming team, I hate this decision. David Stern should step down. He hurt he credibility of the league in a time, coming off the lockout, when it needed it more than ever. I didn’t take much issue with the lockout. Sure, I was upset about missing basketball, but I understood that for a sports league to function they needed to have a system of rules and checks and balances in place. It’s just an extension of the very rules of the game of basketball. I knew these things were needed, so I overlooked the greed of the owners and the illogical decisions of the players throughout the process. Because they were essential for the NBA to continue to be the NBA.

People love sports because they offer something familiar in the face of our unpredictable lives. We don’t know how any given game will turn out, but we understand the rules and how the game works, so we can predict and debate how any given game will turn out. The rules and structures give us a facsimile of understanding. We have the illusion that we are smart enough about the systems and rules to understand how an outcome might turn out. Sometimes we do. We know the Heat will beat the Raptors 99 times out of 100 as currently constructed. They’re fairly evenly matched, so we don’t know how a game between the Bulls and Heat will turn out. But we know how basketball works, and we’ve studied the patterns of the existing players so we argue that the Heat will win because Lebron James can guard Derrick Rose and shut him down and the Bulls’ offense will be disrupted. Or we argue that the Bulls will win because Miami has no reliable post defenders, so Carlos Boozer is going to score 45 points.

We look for patterns and rules and structures and we try to understand and we think we can understand. Add randomness, add chaos, add arbitrariness, and we no longer think we can understand. So we lose that passion. If anything can happen for any reason we don’t care as much. We can’t make a stance or have an argument because well, what if David Stern takes away our team’s best player. If we can’t understand, if we have no basis to believe in our teams, we won’t believe in them. The passion will go away.

The NBA is playing a dangerous game. Players will be (ARE) angry. I don’t think the new CBA would have been ratified had this happened yesterday before the players voted for it. And even larger picture than that, fans can’t understand this. One of two things has to happen for this to blow over. David Stern needs to lay out his reasoning behind taking such an unprecedented step. (I believe this is the only time an NBA trade that worked under the rules has been vetoed.) The reasons will have to make sense to players and fans. Or two, this trade will need to be tweaked to an ‘acceptable’ place and pushed through. (If following the rules doesn’t constitute acceptable, how do we know what does?) Option two has to happen soon, like this weekend, for everything to blow over.

Option one is highly unlikely because there isn’t logic behind this decision that fans and players will agree with. Option two could happen, but it’s a little bit underwhelming. The only reason it works is because as the dumb masses, we’re kind of dumb. And we have a short memory. If the outcome is similar, Chris Paul is on the Lakers, we’ll forget. But we shouldn’t. We now know David Stern can do anything he wants.

And realistically, I’ll forgot too. Even if option one or two doesn’t happen, things will eventually go back to relative normality. It’ll be a huge PR nightmare, but after months or years normalcy will return. Even after Chris Paul leaves New Orleans in 66 games anyway, and the Hornets will have nothing to show for him and Paul will be forty million dollars less wealthy. Arbitrary decisions won’t often be made. And I’ll continue trusting the NBA because I love it. And since it’s a hobby and entertainment, I’ll allow my heart to win out over my head. But I probably shouldn’t.

I’ve never really bought into NBA conspiracy theories. Michael Jordan’s retirement wasn’t a secret suspension for gambling. The league didn’t fix the draft lottery so the Knicks could draft Patrick Ewing. But vetoing this trade is just about as weird as any of the conspiracy theories. And it’s not a theory. It’s fact. I should learn from this. The rules and systems I hold dear as a fan can be a facade if it’s convenient for powerful enough people. We should all learn from this.