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Two months into the season the media and basketball junkies worldwide are going to be talking about the New Orleans Hornets and Chris Paul as if they just crawled out of the swamp to become one of the better teams in the Western Conference. When that happens remember this post.

You see, the memory of NBA fans can be compared to a stoned elephant, or perhaps a goldfish swimming in Everclear. As soon as something new and flashy comes along or an completely fluke injury occurs to a star player they do a 180 on their stance, sometimes completely contradicting their previous sentiment.

Think about it for a second- Two years ago the Hornets were considered dark horse title contenders. ESPN experts had them as the second most likely team to win the NBA title. They weren't unrealistic though, and had the foresight to essentially predict what would wind up happening.

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So the other day I was poking around the Hornets season stats, and noticed just how amazing Thornton had been this season with his turnover rate. I dug a little longer and found out that he had the lowest rate of any qualified guard in the entire league.  Considering the amount of time he's moving and slashing, that's a pretty crazy stat. 

So . . . I pinged John Hollinger and asked him if he knew of any other players who had put up similar numbers while shooting as much as he did.  He directed me to Basketball-Reference.com's Player Season Finder, where he had found quite a  number of players who had posted similar numbers.(though only one rookie!)  That, of course, started me playing with the tool, and I  quickly put together Marcus' three best stats into a query that told me that there have only been four players in the history of the NBA who have put together seasons with 100 made threes, a Turnover Rate under 7.5%, and a Usage Rate over 25%:  Marcus Thornton, Antawn Jamison,  Michael Redd, and . . . Michael Jordan - and Thornton was the only one who did it in his rookie year!

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The news was broken this afternoon by Adrian Wojnarowski at Yahoo! Sports:

The New Orleans Hornets have traded center Hilton Armstrong and cash to the Sacramento Kings in a salary-clearing move, league sources told Yahoo! Sports.

The deal removes Hilton’s $2.8 million salary from the Hornets’ payroll, leaving them only a little more than $500,000 over the luxury-tax threshold. The Kings will send the Hornets a future, conditional second-round pick.

Jimmy Smith of the Times-Picayune reports confirmation of the deal, also from a league source, so it seems it's as good as done. (Update: Hornets.com makes it official.) A few things running through my mind:

• Why did the Hornets do this? The big and obvious answer is money, as Wojnarowski stated. If the Hornets can now dump the contract of someone like Bobby Brown or Ike Diogu, they're under the $69.9 million luxury-tax threshold and won't have to pay the dollar-for-dollar penalty.
  
  
• Not only do the Hornets get that $2.8 million off the books immediately with this trade, but they also save themselves the $3.85 million qualifying offer Armstrong would have been owed next season. No other team would have offered Hilton more than that as a restricted free agent in the summer, so the Hornets would have been stuck with him. Update: As noted in the comments, this is incorrect. "If the Hornets didn't want Hilton on their roster next year, they simply need to NOT extend the Qualifying Offer to him next year. The QO applies only if a team wants to make a player coming off a rookie contract a Restricted Free Agent instead of an Unrestricted one. If Armstrong is not extended a QO, which is the team's right, he merely becomes a UFA."
  
  
• Armstrong had clearly fallen out of favor with head coach Jeff Bower, racking up eleven consecutive DNP-CD's despite being one of the few healthy bigs available with Sean Marks and Ike Diogu out injured.
  
  
• When Armstrong did play, he didn't play well. His averages this season: 2.8 points and 3.4 rebounds in just over 13 minutes per game. He's currently ranked as the fifth worst center in the entire NBA with a 7.75 PER (and look who's three spots above him). According to PER, Armstrong's best season was 2006-07, his rookie campaign, and even then he was worse than average.
  
  
• As we saw from the near-trade of Devin Brown a couple of weeks ago, the Hornets were desperate to shed salary. Thankfully that deal didn't work out, because today's trade of Armstrong works out better for them in almost every way possible. The only downside I can see is that Amrstrong was a big body who could step in and at least deliver six fouls per game if another of the Hornets bigs were to suffer an injury.
  

Overall, this trade doesn't make the Hornets any better or worse right now, but it saves George Shinn some money and avoids Bower having to resort to trading someone like David West to shed salary. Whether that's a good thing or just a delay of the inevitable is up for debate.

From the Twitter account of Yahoo! Sports' Adrian Wojnarowski:

The Hornets have agreed to trade Hilton Armstrong to the Kings, an Eastern Conference exec with knowledge of deal says.

More details will be posted here as we hear them.

12:10 p.m. UPDATE:

More from Wojnarowski on Twitter:

The Hornets have traded forward Hilton Armstrong and cash to Sacramento for a future conditional second rounder, sources tell Y! Sports...

Obviously, the move is a salary dump on Armstrong's $2.8 million salary. This gets Hornets within $500K of luxury tax threshold.

For about 20 minutes of that game, the Hornets weren't even competing.  Lazy passes, terrible rotations, constant miscommunications on defense, too much watching Paul dribble, and some of the worst transition defense I've ever seen.  They would brick shots, Paul would get back, and three Timberwolves would follow him in for a layup as Devin Brown tried to decide if he could catch one of them.  You look at the box score and its hard to figure out how the Hornets win.  The Wolves had a 20 rebound advantage, shot 52% from the field and had twice as many free throw attempts as the Hornets.

The Hornets, however, were bailed out by three things:  a furious three-point assault, the rookies playing well, and a quick-moving small-ball lineup that had Songaila playing center and Posey playing power forward.(and getting the benefit of some 50-50 calls)

Going Small

Jeff Bower recognized something as the game wore on.  Their bigs were tearing up our bigs.  West and Okafor held their own against Jefferson, but when Kevin Love entered the fray, the Hornets started getting crushed on the boards.  Since our bigs couldn't handle the boards, outlet passes were flying, and the young Wolves were out and running, scoring easily in transition en route to a 16 point lead.  It got so bad that even Chris Paul started giving up defensively.

So Bower rolled the dice, sent Songaila out as the center, Posey as the power forward, and loaded up with Thornton, Collison and eventually, Chris Paul on the perimeter.  The Hornets continued to get crushed on the glass, but their pressure on the perimeter and energetic defense inside made it impossible to feed Jefferson and Love in the post.  They stayed home on Sessions, Ellington, and somewhat on Flynn and begged Corey Brewer to shoot.  15-2 run and the Hornets were back into it.  They didn't go back to the starting lineup until 3:30 was left in the game - at which point they immediately gave up a three point lead and had to struggle to finish out.

One thing is clear from that game, though, Posey is not a small forward any longer.  His foot speed is so drastically reduced, he cannot cover anyone on the perimeter.  As a stretch four, he still has possibilities, however limited they may be.

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