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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.

The Minnesota Timberwolves website had an press release up briefly stating they had just traded PG Jason Hart to the Hornets for Devin Brown.  Hart has played in only one game for the Wolves this season, and played only 29 last year for the Nuggets and Clippers.

The two players have the same salary, so the only reason this trade makes sense is if it's part of something else the Hornets are trying to get done - or if Jason Hart has an unguaranteed contract that can be voided, allowing the Hornets to get closer to the Luxury Tax line.  I'd probably suspect the latter.(Update: Jason Hart's contract is non-guaranteed, allowing the Hornets to cut him and get $1 million closer to the Luxury Tax Line, leaving the Hornets 3-4 million to go - otherwise known as the salary of Hilton Armstrong.)

Devin has been playing alright, but this doesn't upset me.  He has no business as a starting shooting guard in the league.  Of course, that leaves the Hornets with an interesting situation if it goes through.  Who does start at shooting guard?

Marcus Thornton?(please?)  Peja Stojakovic with Posey or Wright at the 3?  Collison and Paul as the starting backcourt?  *gulp* Bobby Brown?

Hat tip to Ball Don't Lie for the news.  We'll keep you posted on what happens next.

Update from Jerry Zgoda of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's twitter account:

Kahn says Hart-Brown deal is neither snagged or dead, says more than 1 way to do it, other teams involved.

Update II: Jimmy Smith of the Times-Picayune

Though a report on Yahoo.com indicated the New Orleans Hornets had traded guard Devin Brown to the Minnesota Timberwolves, a source close to the Hornets said Tuesday afternoon no deal had been made or would be . . .

. . [Brown] attended the Hornets' shoot-around Tuesday here at the Toyota Center and is expected to play against the Houston Rockets tonight.

Update III:  Jason Hart was traded to Phoenix today for an expiring player, cash, and a 2010 draft pick. The Hornets had only offered the first two, and clearly were not willing to up the ante.

Trade reported this afternoon on NOLA.com.

Real quick reaction to this deal since I'm on my way out the door. Let's talk $$ first...

The Hornets rid themselves of Antonio Daniels' $6.6 million expiring contract. Bobby Brown has just one season left on his deal, and is owed $736,420. Darius Songaila will make $4,526,000 this season, and has a player option worth $4,818,000 for 2010-11.

So the immediate savings for the Hornets are about $1.3 million, only double that because they also save on the luxury tax penalty.

From NOLA.com:

The Hornets' current payroll, not counting the salary of Ike Diogu, which has not yet been made public, now stands at $73,656,549, down from $74,994,129 before the trade.

The team is still above the salary cap threshold of $69.96 million for this season. If the team does not get under that limit by the end of the season, New Orleans will be taxed $1 for each $1 over the limit.

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As many of you already know by now, the second-round draft pick the Hornets received from the Clippers in yesterday's trade is for 2016. Clippers.com also reports that the Hornets gave up Rasual Butler and an undisclosed amount of cash in the deal.

Diving into some reactions to the trade from around the web:

Tom Ziller, NBA Fanhouse:

This is precisely what New Orleans general manager Jeff Bower was not going to be able to do: drop salary in the tighest NBA climate in decades. But lo! the Hornets are actually on the precipice of slipping under the luxury tax threshold...

The Chandler-Okafor swap was major, and some feel it will hurt New Orleans. But even if it's a downgrade -- and I'm not convinced it was -- it's not big enough, combined with the loss of Butler, to destroy the Hornets' chances. And that's the key here: cutting salary while maintaining your talent base is difficult. Bower has done it.

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