New Orleans Hornets owner George Shinn has been notorious throughout the years as one who likes saving money more than they like winning games.

Whether he deserves this inauspicious distinction or not is debatable, but there is no denying the motivation of Wednesday’s trade of starting shooting guard Rasual Butler to the Los Angeles Clippers in exchange for a conditional second round pick.

To save money.

By shipping arguably the Hornets third best performer from last season’s team—behind All-Stars Chris Paul and David West— and his $3.9 million salary to the West Coast, Shinn can save around $8 million dollars next year, after including the luxury-tax implications.

Sure this helps Shinn’s wallet quite a bit, but it does quite the opposite for the Hornets chances of competing in a loaded Western Conference next season.

While it may be true that Butler is far from being an elite player, his 11.2 points per game and 39 percent 3-point shooting was huge for the Hornets last season.  Not to mention, he was the only player on the Hornets to play in all 82 regular season games last year.

For a team with the injury issues that the Hornets had last season, that’s quite an accomplishment.

Shinn was starting to lose his reputation as a frugal owner after making some very important moves that resulted in the Hornets winning a franchise-record 56 games in 2007, and signing a highly regarded free-agent in James Posey in 2008.

He even dodged a major bullet after trying to send Tyson Chandler to Oklahoma City in what was perceived as a salary dump, but instead sent him to the Charlotte Bobcats for a player with an even larger contract than Chandler had.

Shinn was praised by local and national media alike for doing what he could to enable the Hornets to stay in the race for the Western Conference crown, despite having to shell out quite a bit of money to do so.

Taking on Emeka Okafor’s huge contract would make Shinn responsible for paying him over $10 million for the next five years, but that did not matter because it would improve the team.  There were whispers that the Hornets owner that we once knew for being the target of outcry from Charlotte fans in the 1990s--to the point of those fans running the team out of town--was gone.

A new owner that did what it takes to bring a championship to his team now resided in New Orleans with the Hornets.

After Wednesday, those whispers have gone silent.

The Hornets seemed to have done everything right this offseason, bringing in rookies Darren Collison and Marcus Thornton, as well as signing Ike Diogu to shore up one of the weakest benches in the league from 2008.  They sent away the injury-prone Tyson Chandler for a player that was more productive than the Hornets former center on the offensive end and lacked the long list of injury problems that Chandler possesses.

Now after filling these holes, they have seemingly replaced it with an even bigger hole in the middle of their starting lineup.

Who will be the starting shooting guard for the Hornets next season?  Who will be the consistent player Chris Paul can look to for perimeter jump shots if Peja Stojakovic continues with his injury problems?  Who will the Hornets use to guard teams such as the San Antonio Spurs or the Los Angeles Lakers or the Denver Nuggets who have an abundance of scoring threats on the perimeter?  What if Julian Wright doesn’t make the big jump that seems to be a necessity heading into next season?  What if Collison and Thornton don’t come in and become major contributors right away?  What if Morris Peterson never returns to being the player he was for that 2007 Hornets team?

These questions probably weren’t on the minds of those in the Hornets’ front office leading up to the Butler deal.  But one question surely was.

What can we do to save some money?

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