NBA Butterfly Effect: What if the Chris Paul trade had gone through?
The history of the NBA is a tangled web of what-ifs and could-have-beens. This week at The Step Back, we’re going to pull on some of those threads to alternate futures, focusing in on key turning points in the history of players, teams and the league itself, wondering how things could have been different. Welcome to Butterfly Effect Week.
When the Houston Rockets acquired Chris Paul in July, it felt like basketball poetry. Houston has figured prominently into just about every offseason since general manager Daryl Morey was hired in 2007, and examining their history more closely might give one the impression that the Rockets are patient zero for the entire NBA infrastructure as it stands today. They certainly could have changed the landscape of the league in 2011 with the completion of the original Chris Paul trade.
The wheels never stop spinning in Houston, so it’s not surprising that the team would be involved in as many almosts as any team in the league. In December 2011, the New Orleans Hornets agreed to a deal to send Chris Paul to the Los Angeles Lakers to bridge the gap between Kobe Bryant and the next great Lakers team. As the story’s been told, the Hornets, run by the league’s owners at the time through commissioner David Stern, eventually vetoed that trade on the grounds of competitive imbalance. The Lakers were said to have not been sending enough out to balance the talent they would receive in the form of the All-NBAer Paul.
By negating the deal and canceling a massive criss-cross of player movement, Stern and the NBA inadvertently changed more in one swoop than ever before or since.
The Lakers were desperate and the Hornets were sinking, but the flexibility created by Morey in Houston was the key that allowed this deal to get to its finishing point. It’s also what made the trade look so lopsided in its initial form:
Houston gets:
Pau Gasol
Los Angeles gets:
Chris Paul
New Orleans gets:
Lamar Odom, Kevin Martin, Luis Scola, Goran Dragic, 2012 first-round pick
There are dozens of ripples to examine here. What happens with Phoenix if they don’t get Dragic and fly through that magical 48-win 2013 season with him? If Gasol (who would have been sent to Houston in this deal) improves the Rockets immediately, do they ever go out and get someone like Harden or Howard? What trades change over the last five years if the Lakers never give up the first-round pick they eventually used to get Steve Nash (Plan B after CP3)?
But most powerful and interesting of all are the ripples that moved with real import across the league. Transactions are fun and most of the time they’re important, but they rarely change the landscape of the league. Outside of Paul joining Bryant for his last few seasons in LA, none of the other players involved really would have impacted their new teams. Instead, two pieces at the end of the list quietly went on to sew truly complicated narratives into the league’s recent history.
I’m talking about Lamar Odom and that 2012 Knicks first-round pick, which the Rockets went on to use after the Paul trade was vetoed, selecting a forward named Royce White. The experiences of Odom and White tell the story of a league trying to catch up with its own growth as a generation of superstars entered their twilight.
Before LeBron had won his first championship or Duncan had won his last, the baton had yet to be passed. The year 2012 was a time before social media had fully changed the way people communicated about and interacted with the news. It was a time before athletes would use the medium to become more vocal activists; before the league was involved with their players on that level. The line between these murky waters and the more open, connected place the NBA is today can be traced through the experiences of both Odom and White.
Royce White was fighting for expanded medical attention and health coverage at the same time that Lamar Odom could have used it.
White wanted the Rockets to implement a “mental health protocol” as a condition of his joining the team. This system would have given White’s personal psychiatrist the final say over White’s playing status from game to game. The organization, on the other hand, having already ceded smaller points such as vehicular transportation for drivable distances (fear of flying is a symptom of White’s generalized anxiety disorder), were ready for their draft pick to fulfill his contract and report for camp.
The rookie was fighting a battle larger than himself, before he ever set foot on a NBA court. He argued to Chuck Klosterman in a Grantland interview that mental illness is actually a majority issue as opposed to a minority one– that most of the human population struggles from some sort of mental illness. It was as if being drafted was just a stepping stone toward having a louder voice, that the possibility of sacrificing the potential of playing in the NBA was very real for White even before he got drafted.
In this documentary short (also from Grantland), White and his coaches at Iowa State openly discuss the pros and cons of drafting White, from a team’s perspective. White is honest about his condition, understanding the different things that trigger him and how that might affect an employer within a multi-billion-dollar business. The level of openness is disarming.
That simply being open about mental illness in professional sports can still shock us shows how far there is still to go. It’s just not a path that fans or media members are comfortable traveling. White was ahead of his time, shoving ideas into the zeitgeist that basketball wasn’t ready to reckon with.
But surely part of the blame for the entire situation rests with the Rockets as opposed to just the league as a whole. If it is New Orleans who sits at 16 and takes White, are things different? Perhaps the smaller-town feel of the Crescent City makes for a more comfortable environment for White. Maybe Hornets management, once Tom Benson buys the team, is more amenable. They have gone out of their way for players like Jrue Holiday and Quincy Pondexter in recent seasons, investing more time in their health and comfort as necessary.
Houston played (to some degree) it as a business decision rather than a humanitarian one; they didn’t seem interested in fighting the bigger fight along with White. Today White plays for the London Lightning of Canada’s National Basketball League, in a much more communal environment. Esquire Magazine spoke with him this year about his new life and the Rockets standoff. He is still outspoken and emphatic when discussing the problems that face American professional sports and their ability to manage mental illness for their players.
If the Chris Paul trade goes through, an entire section of NBA history changes, and the ripples from that alone might have altered a lot about how the league treats its players.
If that had happened, perhaps there wouldn’t be a Lamar Odom conversation at all. The inability of a team to see and adjust to warning signs from its players is on full display when considering Odom’s career after the Chris Paul fallout. It became clear, as the Lakers continued to shop him after failing to acquire Paul, that he was unwanted in Los Angeles. Over the next couple years, he was traded to the Mavericks, then signed with the Clippers, then fell out of the league entirely.
It wasn’t just basketball: Odom became involved with the Kardashian family through wife Khloe, which is at its best a media circus and at its worst leaves relationships in shambles. Marriage to Khloe quickly became divorce, right around the same time as he was wearing out his welcome with the Lakers. Rumors swirled about substance abuse, affairs and marital problems. His life was unraveling.
It culminated in a weekend in rural Nevada, at a brothel where Odom paid two companions for 24/7 attention. Reports from Love Ranch had Odom watching television, eating and conversing with two women over the course of several days. Eventually, he was discovered unconscious in his room. Emergency responders took him to a nearby hospital, and a fresh batch of tabloid attention bubbled up.
This meant Odom went through three teams before a critical situation forced him to find help himself. The Mavericks, Clippers and Lakers each had an opportunity to help Odom recover mentally and physically. Instead, influenced by either a strict bottom line or the lack of a status quo for these complex and uncommon situations, no one emerged to help him. Odom hit rock bottom.
Now, it’s hearsay to hoot about which other team might have been more equipped to assist Odom through down the path toward recovery. The truth is no NBA team is ahead of the curve on this stuff. No player has ever found reprieve from his employer as an American professional basketball player. Odom is not exceptional in this sense.
He is exceptional, though, in the way that this one negated trade acted as a catalyst for his failing relationship with the Lakers, a team he had previously experienced great success with. It’s impossible to pinpoint when things began to deteriorate for Odom, but it’s safe to say that actively being shopped by a championship team is one of the worst things that can happen for an athlete.
White and Odom were not nearly the most impactful parts of the proposed Chris Paul-Lakers trade; many of the other moving parts have gone on to impact championships and salary dollars to a much greater degree. But no two players have so profoundly forced the league to look at itself in the mirror over the past decade.
Next: What if Ray Allen missed?
It’s wild to think that the two of them are afterthoughts in the same deal; one that would have also included several other All-Stars and blue-chippers. Odom and White are also the two most interesting and impressive recent representations of how basketball as a business is a game of inches: vetoed, drafted, wanted, unwanted. Things are, and then they aren’t.
You had already like forgotten about Royce White– and when’s the last time you wondered about Lamar Odom? The league keeps moving.