FanHouse George Shinn

New Orleans Hornets owner George Shinn has taken a lot of guff for his ownership habits. Notable decisions have included moving the Hornets to New Orleans from Charlotte, making noise about the required attendance threshold to tether the team to the city, and trying to offload Tyson Chandler for peanuts to save a few bucks.

Most NBA experts and pundits (and yahoos like me) will murmur about Shinn's thrifty disposition and hint that he's itching to bust out of New Orleans for a more profitable market. But this summer, he's put his money where his mouth is and wants some return on that investment.

The FanHouse Podcast: Because bloggers are much sexier on the phone.

Kevin Blackistone -- one of FanHouse's featured columnists -- has far too many accolades for me to mention here. The important thing is that he hit up the 'HouseCast this week to talk about, well, everything. And if that's too general for you, then you have problems. But then fortunately, we're not just bloggers, we're therapists, so here you go: we chat about the Redskins' draft, the problems that owners like Dan Snyder, Al Davis and George Shinn (to name a few) are dealing with right now, Michael Jordan's inability to run a basketball team, Mike Tyson's ear-chomping skills, the Ricky Hatton-Manny Pacquiao fight this weekend in Vegas and Barack Obama's first 100 days. Yes, it's awesome.

If you (note: Hubie Brown voice) are the New Orleans Hornets and you have a point guard under your control who is going to be a free agent in a few years, and you know that you need him to be competitive for an NBA title in a smaller market, you lock him up.

The Hornets -- despite notoriously "frugal" owner George Shinn's ways -- are doing just that, as John Reid of the New Orleans Times Picayune is reporting that Chris Paul and NOLA are getting ready to reach an agreement on a max-deal four or five year extension.

"We're going to try and get it done in the next 24 to 48 hours once I get down there,'' [Paul's agent Lance] Young said by telephone. "I think if you go back and look, there's nobody who did a three-year deal of all the max deals done in the last few years. I would say three years is not what he is going to do. It will be a four or a five-year deal.''

Paul's contract will range from $60 million to $80 million, depending on the length. Young said he and Bower spoke by telephone on Tuesday, the first day teams could begin negotiating contracts with free agents.

Let's be perfectly clear: if you are the the New Orleans Hornets, you give Chris Paul whatever money and how many ever years he wants. He is most certainly one of the top five players in the league, and while many might take Kobe or LeBron if they were starting a team, I think Paul is a legitimate candidate.

And even if you disagree, Paul was most certainly an MVP candidate last year, most certainly the reason for the Hornets resurgence and most certainly worthy of this kind of contract.

Mark Cuban has some advice for George Shinn, whose Hornets are struggling to draw 13,000 fans at home games: try harder. From Gary Washburn of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (via SbB):

"Somebody's got to get off their ass and sell tickets," Cuban said earlier this month. "They've got the best record in the Western Conference and they can't get people to come? That's not New Orleans, that's effort. There's enough people. There's enough basketball fans to get 16, 17,000 people to come, even if they're weekend games. So they have bad nights Monday and Tuesday." [...]

"When I took over the Mavs, we sucked," Cuban said. "I hired 40 salespeople to get out there and get on the phones and I got on the phones and was calling people. Whatever it took. We had concerts after games. If I found a pretty girl, I gave her free tickets so she would tell her guy friends to bring people. Whatever it takes to get people in the arena, you gotta do it and that's what they're not doing down there."