As Boston Celtics general manager Danny Ainge aggressively pursues possible deals for Rajon Rondo(notes), the Indiana Pacers have emerged as an intriguing suitor for the point guard, league sources told Yahoo! Sports.

For the past few days, Pacers officials – and third-party surrogates – have been making calls and gathering information and insight into Rondo’s reputation as a teammate and leader, sources said.

The Pacers and Celtics have discussed the preliminary framework of a deal, but two sources said Indiana would need a third team to provide Boston with the talent it wants to do a deal. The Celtics are likely trying to gather the necessary pieces to make a bid for Ainge’s ultimate target: New Orleans point guard Chris Paul(notes), sources said.

Chris Paul might be the ultimate target for the Celtics in their trade talks.
(NBAE/Getty Images)

It was unclear if the Pacers had begun to reach out to broaden discussions, but there was an expectation they would do so.

The Celtics have been gauging Rondo’s trade value for more than a year, and have held discussions with teams about him across the past few trade deadlines and NBA drafts. There have long been divides within Boston’s front office, coaching staff and locker room about Rondo. He can be moody, difficult and stubborn, and several league sources were dubious if the Pacers’ young coach, Frank Vogel, would have the stature to deal with Rondo.

[ Related: Top 15 NBA free agents: Who tops the list? ]

Boston could be trying to gather players to make a more attractive bid for Paul, sources said. New Orleans has shown no interest in a deal that would include Rondo and any combination of Celtics teammates. Yet, New Orleans GM Dell Demps is determined to get maximum value for Paul, if it’s clear the point guard sees his future elsewhere. Demps has no desire to simply let Paul walk away as a free agent to New York.

Most teams in the league are engaging New Orleans about Paul, whose intentions are to get to the New York Knicks as a free agent in the summer of 2012. Paul does have some history in Oklahoma City, having played there with the Hornets in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but the Thunder have resisted dialogue on a Paul-for-Russell Westbrook(notes) deal, sources said.

The Thunder are prepared to make Westbrook a substantial contract offer – probably a maximum deal – in the near future.

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Indiana Pacers fans went to sleep on Black Friday faced with another weekend of a suspended NBA season and the prospect of contemplating, again, just how far into their own abyss the Indianapolis Colts can slide before 2012 dawns. When we awoke on Saturday morning, though, the basketball world looked markedly different, and brighter. The NBA and the players representatives worked through that long night to reach a tentative agreement that will likely end the months-long lockout and gives the Pacers the chance to wrest back some of their fans from the death grip the Colts have developed over the last half decade. This announcement could be the springboard that the Blue and Gold need to regain the lofty perch they held in central Indiana through the mid-2000s, and I can’t wait for them to resume the trek they began last spring by making the playoffs.

With the Colts winless in 2011, the Pacers have been forced to sit on their hands while Indianapolis sports fans have turned our attention elsewhere. It’s been a long, empty fall in Indiana at a time when we should have been filling Area 55 in Conseco Fieldhouse, welcoming George Hill(notes) home to Indy and generally enveloping ourselves in the daily soap opera of a new NBA season. With the confluence of events that should have played out in the last couple of months, the Pacers could have been well on their way to gripping the community. Instead, we’ve heard little sound bites from the players, and only nothing from the front office, allowing the team to slip further from our collective consciousness.

As it turns out, the delay in getting the 2011-12 NBA season ramped up may actually lead to a more frenzied start for the Pacers. Equipped as they are with ample cap space and sitting in a town hungry for positive sports news, the Blue and Gold are poised to own the local landscape this winter. The next few weeks will be stuffed with free agent talk and training camp reports, and the the season will likely tip off on or around Christmas day. If it all plays out as expected, the Pacers and their fans may be in store for quite a holiday gift.

Adam Hughes was raised, and still lives, in rural Indiana. He has been a Pacers fan since the early 1980s and has witnessed the rise and fall of a great NBA franchise. He follows the current club closely and is anxious for the lockout to end so the Pacers can begin their next ascent.

Note: This article was written by a Yahoo! contributor. Sign up here to start publishing your own sports content.

By now, we should be a week or so into the new NBA season, and Indianapolis should be awash in Blue and Gold as the Indiana Pacers return to action off their most successful campaign in half a decade. The Pacers’ late-season push into the playoffs last April left fans anxious for more and with high hopes for the current group of Indiana players. Now that the NBA lockout has wiped out a whole month of games, though, the atmosphere is changing rapidly, and the goodwill built up in the spring is blowing away with the fall leaves. After the latest round of negotiations, Pacers forward Danny Granger(notes) delivered the bad news that no resolution to the labor strife is imminent.

Late last week, NBA commissioner David Stern and the league presented the players with their latest and greatest proposal, which included a straight 50-50 revenue split between the teams and the players. However, the hotly contested salary cap numbers apparently remained unchanged, and the players seem reluctant to sign any deal that won’t give the players a chance to expand their salary base. Indeed, Granger, who is the Pacers’ player representative, expects the union to reject this offer outright when they convene again on Monday. That’s really bad news, because Stern insists that the league will make no further concessions, meaning that the next step in the process would be some sort of court action.

Granger’s pessimism is a bitter pill because this latest proposal would get the season fired up on December 15 and still allow each team to play 72 games. Missing just 10 contests even with a six-week outage would have been a minor miracle, and the timing would have been just about perfect for the Pacers. With the Indianapolis Colts sliding toward oblivion, this town is ripe for the taking, and the Pacers could have made huge strides with a full pre-Christmas schedule. Maybe Stern made the offer knowing it would be rejected by the players, but the fact remains that something palatable to fans is on the table.

It stings to have bad news such as this delivered by a player, particularly by someone who is often cited as a cornerstone of the franchise, as is Granger. Reading the tea leaves for us does little to increase Granger’s likability, and may actually cost him and the Pacers some support in the long run. Perhaps he should leave the announcements to the union itself.

Adam Hughes was raised, and still lives, in rural Indiana. He has been a Pacers fan since the early 1980s and has witnessed the rise and fall of a great NBA franchise. He follows the current club closely and is anxious for the lockout to end so the Pacers can begin their next ascent.

Note: This article was written by a Yahoo! contributor. Sign up here to start publishing your own sports content.

Indiana Pacers fans waited all last season for point guard Darren Collison(notes) to resurrect the flashes of stardom that he displayed during his rookie campaign with the New Orleans Hornets, but he never really developed a consistency that gave us confidence in his ability to run the team on the floor. While Collison was up and down for the Blue and Gold during his first year in Indiana, he revealed in a recent interview that he has exercised financial restraint and shown good judgement over his first two seasons in the NBA. Having witnessed the downfall of the Pacers during the last five years due in large part to bad judgement on the part of their players, I’m happy to hear that at least one member of the current team is level-headed, and it makes me optimistic about Collison’s future here.

As Collision told the Los Angeles Times during an NCAA exhibition game on November 8, he heeded some sound advice coming out of college and decided to mind his growing bank account closely over the last couple of years. Preparing for the seemingly inevitable lockout which now grips the NBA, Collison eschewed the typical rookie trappings of lavish spending, limiting himself to a condo in L.A. and a splurge for a new Lexus for his mother. Otherwise, Collison says, he has saved most of the income from his young career, and he feels like he could weather an entire lost season without suffering too much.

Of course, for the average American living paycheck-to-paycheck, or for the many unemployed United States workers, it seems nearly unfathomable for an NBA player to fret about his financial future when he’s made a couple of million dollars to this point. But, of course, professional sports is a completely different world than the one in which most of us live, and it’s the rare athlete who plans for the future, particularly at such a young age (Collison is 24).

Darren Collison may not have turned the city of Indianapolis upside down with his play on the court during the 2010-11 NBA season, but he has made some good decisions so far in his life. Basketball is not life, naturally, but wouldn’t you feel more comfortable having your last-second offense run by a young man with good judgement than one who had blown through all his earnings?

Adam Hughes was raised, and still lives, in rural Indiana. He has been a Pacers fan since the early 1980s and has witnessed the rise and fall of a great NBA franchise. He follows the current club closely and is anxious for the lockout to end so the Pacers can begin their next ascent.

Note: This article was written by a Yahoo! contributor. Sign up here to start publishing your own sports content.