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As Niall noted below, yesterday Julian Wright vented some of the frustration he must have been feeling all season via Twitter.

He then, unsurprisingly, spent the next 9 hours or so defending the series of tweets as various followers jumped on him.  He ended with this statement:

Ok, I apologize for venting and making anybody uncomfortable. I just worked hard these past two summers so that's what I'll do this summer!

The thing is . . . he's right.  Julian's primary talents are his rebounding, on the ball defense, and ability to finish (not handle) in transition.  For a brief time this season, when he was able to play with fast-break focused teammates like Darren Collison, Marcus Thornton, and Songaila he looked very good.   That second unit was something I looked forward to every game.

Unfortunately, with all the injuries and roster turnover, he's once again stuck on a  unit with no one to handle the ball and no fleet-footed wingman to fill the opposite lane on the fast break.   That leaves him trapped in half-court offense, where he is forced to rely on his shaky handle, jumper and baseline cuts that are easily prevented by an alert defender.  Square peg.  Round hole.

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To start with let's run down the recent happenings regarding the Hornets.

Chris Paul had successful surgery on his torn meniscus, and has been rehabbing the injury twice a day. He claims his therapy is going as planned, so expect to see him back before too long.

As far as the actual injury goes, I've done a little bit of digging and found out that instead of repairing the torn meniscus, which can increase the rehab time substantially and is often impossible, Doctor James Andrews removed the torn part of Chris's meniscus. The benefit of this operation, as opposed to repairing it, is the recovery time. The average recovery time for an NBA player undergoing the removal of a partially torn meniscus is four to six weeks. I was unable to get an exact recovery timeline for repairing a meniscus, but it is certainly longer than removing it.

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In the last game before the Mardi Gras break, the Bees pulled out a tough win against the reeling Boston Celtics. An optimist would call this a defensive battle, but in reality it looked more like an average Wednesday at the YMCA. The combined forty five turnovers set a season high for both teams, and left some fans (fine it was me) wondering if Adrian Peterson was disguised as a point guard.

Darren Collison

Who knew it was possible for a point guard set a franchise record for turnovers (10) and still dominate his competition? What about saying that same guy was the team's best player? Oddly enough, Collison proved both possible tonight against the overrated and over-matched Rajon Rondo. He totaled 25 points on 16 shots, and had nine assists, finishing only one shy of a very strange triple double.

With 9:23 left in the fourth quarter, Peja made a layup. It would be the last time a Hornet other than Collison made a field goal. In fact, no other Hornet even scored a point for nearly eight minutes after the Stojakovic lay in. In that time, Collison took over, scoring 11 straight for the Bees, while the rest of team was ice cold. It was a truly CP3-like fourth quarter performance.

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Reports are flying from Yahoo News that Hornets' superstar guard, Chris Paul, will undergo arthroscopic knee surgery on Monday, and will miss one to two months. The injury is reportedly a partial tear of his meniscus.

It's being reported that the injury is not season ending, but is indeed more serious than the Hornets initially thought.

Not much else was known about the injury, which Paul suffered against Golden state, and aggravated during an overtime loss to the Chicago Bulls. He sat out the next game against Memphis.

Darren Collison is expected to be the primary benefactor of Paul's minutes, but with the all the recent salary shedding there is no additional backup point guard. Bobby Brown, the former third string point guard, was recently dealt to reduce salary. Marcus Thornton filled in for a few minutes against Memphis, but he's going to have to play 40 minutes a night as the shooting guard.

Morris Peterson, who has seen only 151 minutes this year, will immediately become the Hornets primary, and only, backup guard.

Julian Wright should see more time as well, but he's proven to be even more ineffective at the 2 than the 3.

It's likely the Hornets will search for help from the D-league, but with only 311,000 dollars to work with before going over the luxury tax, it won't be easy.

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.