Chris Paul should have been a Laker.
Now, let me get this straight: Beyond wishing well for Pau Gasol and Metta World Peace, I am by no means a Lakers fan. I am not biased towards or against the Hornets or the Clippers, and although Paul may arguable the best pure point guard in the game today, I’m a bigger fan of Derrick Rose and Deron Williams in the PG department.
As it stands now, both the LA teams are looking fearsome. The Lakers still have the nucleus of Kobe-Gasol-Bynum-Metta, while the Clippers now feature Paul-Griffin-Butler-Billups. Both have a good supporting cast around their star players, but the Lakers’ role players are obviously more experienced. The new battle of Los Angeles is set to begin: it’s rare, but this season, both teams playing home games at the Staples Center will be feared. If LA is a big city like Milan, and the Staples Center is the San Siro, the Lakers and the Clippers have become basketball’s Inter & AC Milan. The Clipper-side of LA doesn’t have the history or the heritage to be compared with the champion sides, but what they will soon have are bandwagons of fans excited to adorn their red and blue colours.
Exciting stuff, indeed, but somewhere within me, no amount of Paul-to-Griffin alley-oops will erase that uneasy feeling of the whole situation, as if the natural course of history has been ruthlessly averted. Chris Paul should’ve joined the Los Angeles Lakers: they made a fair deal for him, they made it first, and it was accepted by the Hornets.
Instead, history was revised forcefully and although Chris Paul found himself in LA, he was wearing a red-and-blue jersey instead of a purple-and-yellow one. This revised history is now the real world, and in the real world, the Battle of LA is set to begin…
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