FanHouse ChrisPaul

Every night there are some stupendous, silly, stupid, or downright outlandish individual lines from around the lig. Doing Lines lets you know which one tops the list.

The last time we got together, three different players scored 40 points or more on the same night. Well, maybe it's not as rare of an occurrence as we thought, since we were just a single point away from it happening again on Wednesday.

Chris Paul missed by one with 39, but Kobe Bryant and Dwyane Wade each delivered, with 41 and 40 respectively.

Chris Paul was dazzling on Wednesday against Dallas, in what really was a must-win for the Hornets if they were going to have any sort of confidence in their ability to play with the top teams as the season goes on. Paul dragged his team to a win with 39 points, on 14-for-23 shooting, including three of four from three-point land.

But as great as Paul was and as below average as Dallas was (Dirk Nowitzki was held to just 12 points on 4-of-15 shooting), if we're going to be honest, his Hornets were fairly fortunate to be able to pull this one out.

Chris Paul is the best point guard in the game today, and Rajon Rondo isn't too far behind at the position, probably in most people's top five. But besides being great at what they do, these guys have something else in common: they play the game with a noticeable chip on their shoulder.

So it shouldn't come as any surprise that when the two went head-to-head in Boston on Sunday, things got a little heated during the game, and words were exchanged on the court after the final buzzer had sounded.

Freaky Friday in NOLA. The greatest point guard in the world -- Chris Paul. A festive atmosphere, the home opener for the Hornets. Tyreke Evans, rookie point guard for the Sacramento Kings, had a big challenge ahead. Never mind he was coming off an underwhelming debut Wednesday in Oklahoma City. For the 20-year-old wolf in wolf's clothes, this was the proverbial uphill battle.

And though it didn't end with glass slippers or even confetti, Evans proved he belongs in the NBA.

Warriors coach Don Nelson has gone out of his way to compare rookie Stephen Curry to a young Steve Nash. That's a nice comparison and one any young player would likely take.

But Curry's already got a mentor, thank you, and it's tough to argue with his choice: Chris Paul.

Curry and Paul, both from North Carolina, go back a few years. But this summer their friendship grew, the result of spending nearly a month working out together at various venues in the South.

FanHouse previews all 30 NBA teams in advance of the 2009-10 season.

Time at the peak isn't supposed to be this short.

The Hornets jolted the West in 2008, nearly taking the first seed in the conference one season after missing the postseason entirely. After waxing Dallas in what would become Avery Johnson's final playoff series there, the Hornets went all the way to Game 7 against the defending champion Spurs. The Hornets lost, and didn't get close in 2008-09.

You can believe one of three things. The Hornets' short triumph could be over, more flash in the sky than formation of a new star. The Hornets could have experienced just a brief setback, a defeat at the hands of a bad match-up and an injury-riddled season. Or, the Hornets could have just ran into some structural problems in need of fixing, which they possibly have this summer.

Cleveland's Shaquille O'Neal stood with the NBA's incumbent, locked-out referees last week, calling officials "vital" and saying that the players "need perfection" from game crews. But Hornets capo Chris Paul isn't sweating the replacement corps, which will descend upon New York for a boot camp later this week before taking the reins on October 1 when the preseason schedule kicks off.

Paul told his hometown Winston-Salem Journal that he's not worried teams will be overly physical with him if less experienced referees are roaming the sidelines.

How a trade will affect someone's individual numbers seems like a minor concern, a question for the bored or insane. But when it comes to Chris Paul, and more specifically Chris Paul's passing, and even more specifically Chris Paul's alley oops, the value of discussion covers a wider swath of basketball fandom. Paul-to-Tyson Chandler is such an infamous part of today's NBA that we mourned its loss the last time Chandler got traded.

The conventional wisdom is that while Chandler is bombastic in the air, a true finisher, incoming Hornet Emeka Okafor is seen more as a deliberate, below-the-rim pivot player. That would seem to bode poorly for our visions of soft lobs and vicious hammers, and also for Paul's assist numbers.

But actually, Okafor will probably help Paul on offense.

There was a time, not that long ago, when Chris Paul was not into the whole Twitter thing. In fact, due to various impostor accounts that popped up, it became kind of a joke/meme to tweet -- in all caps, of course -- CHRIS PAUL IS NOT ON TWITTER!

Right about now, he probably wishes that he wasn't.

After a report appeared in Pro Basketball News on Friday that had Paul on the record acknowledging the fact that given the Hornets' financial situation, there was the possibility that he could be traded, Paul updated his Twitter page with a complete denial, which effectively accused the reporter of making the whole thing up.

The only problem? The reporter in question, Chris Tomasson, has the whole thing on tape.

By now, you've probably seen the play from Game 2 of the Western Conference Finals, where Chauncey Billups inbounded the ball to himself off of Kobe Bryant's back, and got himself an easy layup because of it. Crafty move by a cagey veteran, and a play that you almost never see in a real game, much less at this stage of the playoffs, right?

Actually, that's wrong. Because we saw the same thing happen back in February, and it once again happened to Kobe -- courtesy of Chris Paul.