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Steve Dawson

Basketball is a superstars' game. With only five men on court per team, individuals are going to stand out, even in their absence.

Personnel trades between NBA teams are therefore make-or-break moves. When a superstar leaves a team, just as LeBron James left the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2010, they can go from championship challengers to no hopers.

By the same token, when a superstar joins a team, he immediately transforms it to a more elevated status. But if that superstar moves to a team that already has a proven winner, they can instantly become the team to beat.

It's for this reason that there has been so much attention on Chris Paul and Dwight Howard this week. Everyone likes a competitive season and the prospect of one or both of these men leaving cities where they are the franchise player and moving to a new home where they join another exulted name makes for yet another title-challenging outfit.

Paul is 26 years old and has spent all of his six NBA years with the New Orleans Hornets.

Over the last two seasons he's averaged 40 per cent on 3-point attempts, he led the league in steals last season with 2.35 per game and with 9.8 assists per game was the 4th most productive provider.

He's seen as the perfect foil for a dominant player and that's why he moved to the LA Clippers after the league controversially nixed the notion of him joining Kobe Bryant at the Lakers only days before.

Paul joins last season's Rookie of the Year Blake Griffin (12.1 rebounds per game, 22.5 points per game) and Clippers fans will be toasting that because it instantly transforms them from the 4th best team in the Pacific division into a lock for the post-season.

What of Dwight Howard? Superman wants rings and while he'll get a good look at one every year, realistically he'll never get to put one on while he's balling with the current Orlando roster.

Howard is a big guy. With 22.9 points per game, 14.1 rebounds per game and 2.38 blocks per game, he has the impactful numbers in any game he plays.

His realistic options are on either coast. In Los Angeles he could join the Lakers, probably with the Spaniard Pau Gasol leaving as part of the trade. Such a deal would team Howard up with Kobe Bryant - a combination potentially as potent as James and Dwyane Wade in Miami.

In many ways the Lakers are the NBA's marquee team. Even if it all went perfectly for Howard such that he and Kobe won another Laker championship, it would be just that, another NBA championship. Looking back, it would be Kobe's career that gets remembered and his multiple rings that get the adulation.

Howard is very, very self aware. A basketball player can easily see himself as being bigger than the team.

It's for that reason that the better fit for Dwight Howard might be with the Nets, currently of New Jersey but as of the 2012/13 season of Brooklyn, New York where they'll herald a new era, in a new arena, in a new state.

The Nets are co-owned by one of Russia's richest tycoons Mikhail Prokhorov and New York music impresario Jay Z. With Deron Williams already in place, Howard as a new arrival and the impetus that a new arena will create in the most energetic sporting city in the world, the Nets could bed in during this truncated season.

Beyond that, they could pick up more imaginative personnel and have Dwight Howard cast as a New York legend by the time Kobe Bryant is ready to retire across the fruited plains in California.