Report: Pitino once helped shoot down attempt to move Hornets to Louisville

In 2002, then-Hornets owner George Shinn presented an ultimatum to Charlotte: Construct a new arena, or he'd move the team. When a new facility wasn't built, Shinn followed through by relocating his franchise to New Orleans after some flirtation with Louisville, Norfolk, and St. Louis.

Fifteen years later comes a report that Shinn actually had a nonbinding agreement to move the team to Louisville. According to Bloomberg's Joe Nocera, Eben Novy-Williams, and Michael McDonald, disgraced Cardinals coach Rick Pitino and University of Louisville athletic director Tom Jurich had a hand in stopping it.

"If Rick Pitino doesn't want us there, why are we going there?" former NBA commissioner David Stern is quoted as saying at the time.

Louisville has always been known as a college basketball hotbed, and has occasionally been mentioned as a possible NBA expansion or relocation site, most recently last year. The KFC Yum! Center, an NBA-caliber arena, opened in 2010 with Pitino's Cardinals as its main tenant.

Pitino and Jurich were fired by the university in October in the wake of the NCAA scandal that enveloped the Cardinals and several other college basketball programs.

The New Orleans Hornets were renamed the Pelicans in 2014, when the Hornets team name and records reverted to Charlotte - which had been awarded the Bobcats expansion franchise in 2004.