New Orleans Hornets General Manager Dell Demps appeared more relaxed Thursday than he had been in recent days when trade uncertainty involving Chris Paul hovered over the franchise. After Paul was unwilling to sign an extension to remain in New Orleans, the Hornets traded the four-time All-Star point guard to the Los Angeles Clippers on Wednesday night in exchange for shooting guard Eric Gordon, center Chris Kaman, forward Al-Farouq Aminu and a 2012 unconditional first-round pick the Clippers had acquired from the Minnesota Timberwolves.

“We’re glad to get that process over,’’ Demps said. “We are set for the future, and I think we got some hard-playing guys with some vets mixed in with some young guys.

“I think our basketball IQ is going to be really good. I think we’re going to share the ball and be a defensive-oriented team.’’

The Hornets open their preseason schedule tonight on the road against the Memphis Grizzlies, but Gordon, Kaman and Aminu are not expected to join the team until Saturday for an open practice at the New Orleans Arena.

“I think everything is a little more at ease now,’’ said guard Jarrett Jack, who is expected to take over the starting point guard job. “We kind of know what and whom we’re getting back out of the situation, and hopefully, those guys can get here as soon as possible.’’

NBA Commissioner David Stern signed off on the deal for the league-owned franchise after nixing two earlier trades with the Lakers because he said it gave the franchise building blocks for the long term by acquiring young players.

Also significant, the deal assured a substantially lower payroll compared to the initial deal that Stern nixed that had Paul going to the Lakers with the Hornets acquiring guards Kevin Martin and Goran Dragic, forward Luis Scola and a first-round pick from the Houston Rockets and forward Lamar Odom from the Lakers.

If that trade had been approved, it would have increased the Hornets’ payroll this season by $31.5 million. Martin’s salary for the upcoming season is $12 million, Scola is set to earn $8.5 million, Odom $8.9 million and Dragic $2.1 million.

In comparison, the Hornets only added $18.7 million to their payroll after Wednesday night’s trade.

The NBA, which has owned the Hornets since last year, wants to get back at least full value from the $300 million it paid to acquire the team from former Hornets owners George Shinn and Gary Chouest.

“I think the future of the Hornets in New Orleans is looking better today than it’s ever looked before,’’ Stern said during Wednesday night’s teleconference.

Outspoken TNT studio analyst Charles Barkley said the trade was great for the Hornets because they weren’t going to win with Paul remaining on the roster.

“For what they gave up, they’re better off,’’ Barkley said. “They got a couple of starters; this was a good trade for the New Orleans Hornets.’’

Gordon, 22, is a superb shooter and averaged 22.3 points last season for the Clippers. Kaman, 29, is an eight-year veteran who was an All-Star selection during the 2009-10 season. Aminu, 21, is a developing player likely to come off the bench at small forward.

Another beneficial piece the Hornets gained in the deal was acquiring Minnesota’s 2012 unprotected first-round pick. The Clippers acquired the pick from Minnesota when it traded former guard Sam Cassell to the Timberwolves in 2005. The pick is considered unconditional because the Hornets’ slot position will be based on who finishes with the worst record this season between the Clippers and Timberwolves. The pick could be a lottery selection for the Hornets if the Timberwolves fail to make the playoffs like they did last season.

“That obviously was a big part of the trade,’’ Demps said about the pick. “But I think Minnesota is going to be a good team. They got a lot of young pieces.’’

Despite the young talent acquired in the trade, Hornets Coach Monty Williams said losing a franchise player such as Paul will definitely leave a mark.

“I’m going to miss him,’’ Williams said. “We had a lot of talks. Some of them, he didn’t care what I had to say. But at the end of the day, I always knew he had my back when we had to go to battle.

“Yes, we’re glad that we’re moving on because this situation was a bit cloudy, but at the same time, we’re certainly going to miss him.’’

John Reid can be reached at jreid@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3407.

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Sometime in late June, after New Orleans Hornets owner/NBA Commissioner David Stern has presented the Larry O’Brien Trophy to the league’s champion, Monty Williams will park himself in front of a TV screen and begin his self evaluation.

There are no summer reruns on Williams’ schedule, though.

“How many times can you watch ‘Law and Order’ or ‘House?’” Williams said. “By next week, I’ll be ready to get back at it. It’s how I learn about things. I learned a lot about this team last year before I took the job, by watching all the games. And I love basketball. Pretty soon the playoffs will be over and we won’t have anything to watch.

“I’ll just throw the games in, take my notes. It’s how I can get better for me as a coach. It’s an easy one for me. And how they do the games now, I don’t have to listen. I can turn the volume down and it just goes through play by play by play. I can just click through a game. It’s a lot easier.”

There will be 96 games for Williams to view — 82 regular-season games, six playoff games and eight exhibitions — that’s nearly 100 performances to critique.

And Williams, who is intensely critical, expects to see an awful lot on which he can improve.

That’s a message Williams shared with his players one week ago, as they convened for the last time at the New Orleans Arena, the morning after the Hornets were eliminated in six games from the first round of the Western Conference playoffs by the two-time defending champion Lakers.

“From my side,” said Williams, “we have to get better as players. No matter what the situation is, whether it’s working on your jump shot, working on understanding schemes and strategies, guys have to get better. Along those lines, I made them a promise that I was going to get better as coach. I see from watching film now, I’m seeing areas where I need to get better. We all have a ways to go.”

Williams’ coaching pedigree was created by his working relationships as a player and coach under a group of mentors who collectively have won 11 NBA championships.

His two most recent teachers, San Antonio’s Gregg Popovich and Portland’s Nate McMillan — who has yet to win a championship — were avid offseason video watchers, Williams said, traits he’s borrowing while adding his own nuances.

“Nate watches film like you wouldn’t believe,” Williams said. “And Pop used to watch these projects: have the (video) guy take the last five minutes of every playoff game, and they would watch it as a staff. He’d already watched it. He watched a ton of European games. That’s something I want to implement as well. Both of the guys I’ve worked for just watched film.

“Now whether they do it the way I’m going to do it, probably not. I’m just taking some things from them and adding it to what I want to do.”

In reality, Williams’ offseason learning experience began during the Hornets’ series against the Lakers, where he observed Lakers Coach Phil Jackson, who has won 11 NBA titles.

When the two coaches met at midcourt last Thursday night after Los Angeles’ close-out win, ordinarily caustic Jackson had some kind words for Williams’ work and his team’s, so much so that Williams walked back to share a few more thoughts with Jackson before each departed for their respective dressing rooms.

“Coach Jackson has the ability to back off and let it kind of develop and happen, and can with that kind of talent,” said Williams. “But I liked his way with the referees, with his players. Never embarrassed a guy, but he got his point across. I’ve watched, and every once in a while I’d look down there and see him kind of talking to a guy. It was interesting the way he did things.”

And just what did Jackson offer to Williams afterward?

“He said some pretty positive things about our team,” said Williams. “When he first came up to me, he said, ‘Congratulations’ and all that and was talking about how much we improved. And then I just went back over and said, ‘Coach, I appreciate the positive things you’ve said about us.’

“You know, he’s said some things about New Orleans, and I don’t get into all that. I could say some things about L.A. that you guys would print. But I’m not going to do that. I tend to look at the good things he said about our team. And those are things that we can build off. I took it as an honor to be able to coach against him in his last year. He may be the winningest coach in the history of sports. And I had a chance to coach against him.”

The Hornets improved from 39 wins a year ago and a place in the NBA lottery to 46 victories this year and a playoff spot.

Williams concedes, however, there are numerous areas in which he can improve his coaching skill-set.

“I have a number of regrets this year,” he said. “I told the guys I wasn’t going to get into the summertime and be on my RV trip and say ‘I wish I would have done XYZ.’ I don’t think I have those. The regret I have is maybe saying too much, or doing too much, or maybe overcoaching situations. I’m not afraid to admit I have the same insecurities as any other man. And when you’re a young coach, you try to prove you’re this or that as a coach.

“There were times where I probably could have just taken a deep breath, burped, and backed off of the situation and let it happen. I thought that could have hurt us a little bit this year, maybe hurt a player’s growth. So backing off is probably one of the things I wish I could have done.”

Nonetheless, Williams charted a course through his rookie season that few first-year coaches have experienced: the offseason unhappiness of the face of the franchise, an early season takeover of ownership by the league, personal tragedies suffered by members of the team, a devastating late-season injury to the leading scorer.

All ordeals, Williams noted, that have formed a foundation for the future.

“I’ve been talking to some people I confide in, older people, mentors if you will, and their interpretations was ‘Monty, you got a lesson this year that a lot of guys won’t get in 20 years of coaching in the NBA,’” Williams said.

“So I’m going to look at those situations and try to apply them as much as I can, what to do going forward. But I don’t think they’ll help me until we go through other situations. Now I have a reference point that not many rookie coaches have.”

Jimmy Smith can be reached at jsmith@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3814.

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LOS ANGELES — Amazingly, one game into the first round of the Western Conference playoffs between the New Orleans Hornets and Los Angeles Lakers, no one has yet offered the time-worn maxim “a series doesn’t begin until someone wins a game on the road.”

Consider this series well under way.

If the Hornets didn’t have the Lakers’ attention coming into Sunday afternoon’s first game in Staples Center — Los Angeles Coach Phil Jackson trotted out his own time-worn excuse about his team’s inability to play well in early starts — New Orleans’ stunning 109-100 victory certainly opened the Lakers’ eyes.

Yet, the relative ease in which the prohibitive underdog Hornets handled the Lakers on their home court could open the door for complacency, especially for a team comprised of mostly postseason newcomers up and down the bench, including the man occupying the first chair, Coach Monty Williams.

But veteran guard Chris Paul’s competitive nature likely won’t allow for a letdown in Game 2 tonight.

“One game. One game,” Paul said of Sunday’s already-in-the-rear-view-mirror triumph. “We’ve been in the playoffs before, so we understand that that’s all it is.”

Paul, among others, is speaking in cautionary tones about the value of Sunday’s victory in the big picture, and what stealing another win here tonight might mean for the Hornets.

“It would mean a lot,” Paul said, “but we’re just gong to take it one day at a time right now and not get ahead of ourselves and understand that (tonight) is just as important as (Sunday) was.”

And Williams, who this season has dealt with frustrating droughts that followed a season-opening eight-game winning streak and a pre-All-Star break 10-game wining streak, said Tuesday he took immediate steps within his coaching staff and with the players to stem any degree of self-satisfaction that might have been blossoming after Sunday’s Game 1 win.

“We talked about it as soon as the game was over with,” Williams said Tuesday. “For us, winning Game 1 against a team like the Lakers is like getting a first down in football. The game is a long way from being over. We’ve got a lot more to do, and we didn’t dwell on it. As a staff, and as a unit, we’ve talked about the first quarter of Game 2, and that’s as far as we’re going to go with it. Internally, with the staff, that’s what I talked about. It’s only a first down for us. You’re playing against the champs, and you can’t take anything for granted.”

And his message to the players?

“One step,” said Williams. “You’ve done something you haven’t done all year long, which is beat the Lakers. But we’ve got to do what we did better, execute better, and understand that this situation only comes along once in a lifetime. You’ve got to relish it.”

Hornets forward Trevor Ariza, whose lock-down defense of former teammate Kobe Bryant on Sunday kept Bryant scoreless in the game’s last 6 1/2 minutes, said he knew exactly the mood at the Lakers’ El Segundo practice facility the past two days.

“They’re not rattled at all,” said Ariza, a member of Los Angeles’ championship team during the 2008-09 season. “They’re focused and gearing up to play against us on Wednesday. It’s going to be a different game, not the same. But I think everybody here is pretty much ready. They want to play. They want to contribute. We all just want to do our part to help our team win.”

There is, Ariza emphasized, no room for smugness.

“We don’t play this game just to win one game or keep it a series,” he said. “We play this game to move on to the next and try to win a championship.”

To that end, Williams has continued to hammer home the Hornets’ status as not just underdogs in this series, but the national perception that New Orleans has no business expecting any measure of success against a team that has won back-to-back NBA titles and defeated the Hornets four times in the regular season.

“We’ve had these great events throughout the season, with the streaks, and beating teams most people thought we’d get smashed by,” Williams said. “We’ve been in this situation before. Now, we haven’t done it against the Lakers.

“But we’re used to being in situations where people thought we’d get smacked. And we come out fighting. And we get a good result. I think we’ve learned from that, and I also believe that we won one game. The guys understand that. It’s a long series. We don’t have enough experience to know what we’ve done. So we’ve got to continue to do the things that have helped us have success this year.”

And if Hornets players need to hear it from a voice other than Williams, he said, all they need do is gauge the perceptions of others, Sunday’s Game 1 victory notwithstanding.

“It hasn’t changed for us,” Williams said. “Nobody has given us a chance all year long. So I’ve pushed that point all year. ‘You haven’t done anything. People still expect you to get smacked. They still expect a sweep from here.’ If you think otherwise, you’re in for a rude awakening.

“All you’ve got to do is turn on NBA TV, ESPN, XYZ, and everybody is talking about what’s going to be done to us. Nothing has changed in my book.”

Jimmy Smith can be reached at jsmith@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3814.

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