There are a ton of “what if…?” moments in sports history, and the Chris Paul nixed trade to the L.A. Lakers in 2011 is definitely one of them.
After Paul’s former team, the New Orleans Hornets, agreed in principle to ship the All-Star point guard to the Lakers that season, then NBA Commissioner David Stern nixed the deal, making NOLA look elsewhere to send CP3, with him, ultimately, ending up in Los Angeles with the Clippers.
Preparing for their final two games against one another this week, both Bryant and Paul talked to ESPN about the phone call they had when it was first announced that the two were, presumably, going to be Lakers teammates.
Per ESPN:
“You know me. My dream isn’t to win games,” Bryant recalled to ESPN this week. “It’s like, ‘How many of these titles are we going to win [together]?’ Because if we don’t win, we’re a failure.”
“It was crazy,” Paul told ESPN this week. “It was exciting. We talked about potentially being teammates and all that stuff like that. Then, in the blink of an eye, gone.”
When he first got word of being sent to the Lakers in 2011, Paul tweeted out his shock and enthusiasm with one simple word:
WoW
— Chris Paul (@CP3) December 9, 2011
Unfortunately, it never materialized, leaving both Bryant and Paul wondering what might have been had circumstances been different, telling ESPN how they believed they could have coexisted and worked brilliantly together:
“It worked for the Olympic team and stuff like that,” Paul said. “I played in a lot of All-Star Games with Kobe. I don’t know how many, but I remember one of them, we said, ‘As long as we’re both on the same team playing this game, we’re not going to lose,’ just because we both know how competitive we are.”
Bryant agreed.
“When we played together in every All-Star Game, we never f—– around,” Bryant said. “It was like, ‘Listen, the guys have their fun, but now let’s do what we do.’ I knew how competitive he was, and I knew it would be a perfect fit. We just kind of talked about what we’re going to do, how we’re going to scheme to get things done. Unfortunately, it never happened.”
Since landing with the Clippers instead of the Lakers, Paul has seen better times than Kobe has, but Bryant believes that that wouldn’t have been the case had Stern never evaporated the initial trade.
“Things would’ve been very, very, very different around here,” Bryant said, “with two of the most competitive people the league has ever seen.”
This is the one time in history that the Clips got the best of the Lakers, and the rest of the league was happy they did, because the two could have been dominant in the backcourt together.
[H/T ESPN]