Chris Paul's return stint with the Los Angeles Clippers has come to an abrupt and stunning end, the franchise parting ways with one of its greatest players in a late-night meeting that will add another layer of drama to the team's terrible start this season.
The news was delivered in a meeting in Atlanta that ended around 2 a.m. Wednesday, Clippers basketball operations president Lawrence Frank said. Frank said he made the decision to sever ties with Paul on Sunday, then told the franchise's career assist leader that he needed to see him on Tuesday in Atlanta.
Frank did not confirm speculation that Paul and Clippers coach Tyronn Lue have been clashing or not speaking to one another, insisting the decision had multiple layers. Frank also insisted that Lue is safe, despite the Clippers' dismal start to this season. They improved to 6-16 with a win over the Hawks on Wednesday.
“This decision had nothing to do with one incident, one meeting that did or did not happen," Frank said in a video conference with reporters. "Some of our business, respectfully, I have to keep in house. But this didn’t come down to one incident or one meeting. It just wasn’t the right fit.”
Paul made the announcement on social media shortly before 3 a.m. Wednesday, posting "Just Found Out I'm Being Sent Home” and adding a peace emoji.
Clippers star James Harden said he learned of the news when he woke up Wednesday. His reaction: “definitely surprised,” he said.
“Not just Chris, it’s a lot that we’re dealing with,” Harden said. “So, that right there is out of my hands.”
Los Angeles lost at Miami on Monday night to extend its wildly disappointing start to the season. The Clippers' flight to Atlanta from Miami on Tuesday was delayed for about 4 1/2 hours, according to flight records, which led to the late-night session between Frank and Paul. The team didn't land in Atlanta until shortly before 10 p.m., and Frank had told Paul he would be waiting to meet.
“Because of the nature of the conversation it was a long, long, long, long, long, long meeting,” Frank said.
The 40-year-old Paul is playing his 21st NBA season, and he strongly hinted last month that it will be his last. The 12-time All-Star and two-time Olympic gold medalist has earned four All-NBA first team selections, and he ranks second in NBA history with 12,552 assists. He was the first player to score at least 20,000 points while recording at least 10,000 assists; LeBron James and Russell Westbrook have both since done that as well.
“I don’t think it will necessarily help our team,” Lue said before the game in Atlanta. "I don’t think the reason why we’re 5-16 is because of CP. I just think that it wasn’t a good fit for what he was looking for.
“Do I want to see people go out like this? No, I have a lot of respect for him,” Lue added. “He’s been a friend of mine over the years, and you don’t want to see a great go out like this. But I’m pretty sure he will find something, because he’s a great player.”
Paul became arguably the most accomplished player in Clippers franchise history while leading the team to six winning seasons from 2011-17, including the Clippers' first two Pacific Division titles and three playoff series victories. Paul returned to Los Angeles as a free agent last July, rejoining a franchise where he is loved by fans while having an outside chance to contend for his first championship alongside Harden and Kawhi Leonard.
It didn't happen.
“We did not make this move because of our underperformance," Frank said. "He had nothing to do with that. I take full responsibility for our record. We are not scapegoating Chris Paul. We have many issues, and we’re going to address each issue for our underperformance. But I do want to make it clear: We have great respect for Chris, for the career that he’s had and for his impact on the organization, what he did to help transform the franchise, and we’re not blaming him for underperformance.”
The Clippers will likely try to trade Paul, who signed a $3.6 million deal to return to LA. A trade cannot happen until Dec. 15 by league rules.
Paul hasn’t spoken to reporters since he strongly hinted at retirement while the Clippers were back in his native North Carolina. But he acknowledged a video retrospective of his career played by the Clippers during a timeout at Intuit Dome last week. The video ended with “Congratulations, Point God” on the screen.
Paul couldn't really be blamed for the Clippers' profound struggles this season because he hasn't played much.
He is averaging 2.6 points and 3.3 assists while playing just 14.3 minutes per game — all career lows — and he didn't play at all in five straight games in mid-November. Paul had eight points and three assists while playing 15 minutes against the Heat in what turned out to be his final game with the team — a game in which Harden and other starters were effectively benched, in the latest sign of discord for Lue's team.
“T Lue's a hell of a coach," Frank said. "He’s going to continue to be the coach here for a long time.”
The Clippers snapped a five-game slide Wednesday. Leonard has been limited to 11 games by injuries, and they've already lost guard Bradley Beal to season-ending hip surgery.
The Clippers’ streak of 14 consecutive winning seasons is the longest active streak in the NBA, but owner Steve Ballmer’s club has yet to show signs of contention this season — and now they're going forward without a historically talented point guard and franchise favorite.
“Chris’ legacy with us stands," Frank said. "This situation just didn’t work out at this time.”
Associated Press freelance writer Bill Trocchi in Atlanta contributed to this report.
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Cleveland Cavaliers guard Donovan Mitchell, left, talks with Los Angeles Clippers guard Chris Paul, right, after their NBA basketball game Sunday, Nov. 23, 2025, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)
Los Angeles Clippers guard Chris Paul warms up before the team's NBA Cup basketball game against the Los Angeles Lakers Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
Los Angeles Clippers guard Chris Paul (3) controls the ball under pressure from Dallas Mavericks forward Caleb Martin during the first half of an NBA basketball game Saturday, Nov. 29, 2025, in Inglewood, Calif. (AP Photo/William Liang)
NEW YORK (AP) — Ted Turner, a brash and outspoken television pioneer who raced yachts, owned huge chunks of the American West and transformed the news business by launching CNN in 1980, has died at age 87.
The network reported Turner died Wednesday, citing a news release from Turner Enterprises.
Turner owned professional sports teams in Atlanta, defended the America’s Cup in yachting in 1977 and donated a stunning $1 billion to United Nations charities. He married three women — most famously actor Jane Fonda — and earned the nicknames “Captain Outrageous” and “The Mouth of the South.”
He once bragged: “If only I had a little humility, I’d be perfect.”
He was slowed in later years by Lewy Body Dementia. Long since out of the television business, he concentrated on philanthropy and his more than 2 million acres of property, including the nation’s largest bison herd.
His garrulous personality sometimes overshadowed a driven, risk-taking business acumen. By the time he sold his Turner Broadcasting System to Time Warner Inc. in a 1996 media megadeal, Turner had turned his late father’s billboard company into a global conglomerate that included seven major cable networks, three professional sports teams and a pair of hit movie studios.
Turner’s signature achievement was creating CNN, the first 24-hour, all-news television network in 1980. At a time news is instantly available at anyone’s fingertips, it’s hard to recall that the idea of letting consumers decide when they choose to learn what’s going on in the world was once revolutionary.
In part, Turner’s own frustration with television news was the instigator. He often worked past 8 p.m., after the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly newscasts had already gone off the air, and was in bed by the time his local stations did their own newscasts at 11 p.m.
He took a chance by starting the operation sometimes derided as the “chicken noodle network” in the early days of cable television, living in an apartment above its Atlanta office.
“I was going to have to hit hard and move incredibly fast and that’s what we did — move so fast that the (broadcast) networks wouldn’t have the time to respond, because they should have done this, not me,” Turner recalled in a 2016 interview with the Academy of Achievement. “But they didn’t have the imagination.”
CNN’s breakthrough moment came during the Gulf War with Iraq in 1991. Most television journalists had fled Baghdad, warned of an imminent American attack. CNN stayed, capturing arresting images of a war’s outbreak, with anti-aircraft tracers streaking across the sky and correspondents flinching from the concussion of bombs.
Turner was promised a continued role in CNN after his company’s sale to Time Warner for $7.3 billion in stock, but was gradually pushed out, much to his regret.
“I made a mistake,” he later said. “The mistake I made was losing control of the company.”
That same year — 1996 — saw the birth of Fox News Channel and arrival of a new dominant mogul in cable news, Rupert Murdoch. Political opinion became the stock in trade of networks like Fox News and MSNBC. Even though CNN built a worldwide news organizations particularly strong online, it struggles to this day with a diminished desire for straighter TV newscasts.
Robert Edward Turner III was born Nov. 19, 1938, in Cincinnati. When he was 9, his family moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he grew up. After being expelled from Brown University for sneaking a coed into his room, Turner came to Atlanta to work as an account executive for his domineering father’s billboard company, Turner Advertising.
After his father’s 1963 suicide, Turner took over the company. In 1970, he bought an independent UHF station with a weak signal that didn’t even cover Atlanta.
On Dec. 17, 1976, he began transmitting the station to cable systems around the country via satellite. It became the TBS SuperStation. “It was the start of something bigger than we ever imagined,” Turner said in 1996.
TBS’ motley collection of old movies and “The Andy Griffith Show” reruns was augmented by Turner’s acquisition of baseball’s Atlanta Braves. Perennial doormats, the Braves slowly attracted fans across the nation through their superstation exposure and in the 1980s began declaring themselves “America’s Team.”
Turner, who early on donned a uniform and managed one game, helped open baseball’s free-agent price wars by signing pitcher Andy Messersmith.
In the 1980s, Turner went deeply into debt to buy MGM, a move again greeted with skepticism.
But the acquisition gave his company a huge library of vintage movies that eventually were parlayed into the TNT and Turner Classic Movies networks. His devotion to older movies earned Turner a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2004. He was also criticized for adding color to classic movies like “Casablanca,” which he said he did to make them appealing to a younger audience.
TBS also acquired the Hanna-Barbera animation library, which led to the launch of the Cartoon Network.
“He sees the obvious before most people do,” Bob Wright, former president and CEO of NBC, told The New Yorker in 2001. “We all look at the same picture, but Ted sees what you don’t see. And after he sees it, it becomes obvious to everybody.”
He revealed his ambitions as a younger man: “I used to tell people I wanted to become the world’s greatest sailor, businessman and lover all at the same time.”
Asked to share the secret to his success, he said: “Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.”
For much of his life a partying roustabout who wooed beautiful women with a roguish charm, the lean, mustachioed sportsman married three times. He was married to Fonda from 1991 to 2001. She quit acting while married to Turner, but tired of his philandering and divorced him, although they remained friends.
“He was sexy. He was brilliant. He had 2 million acres by the time I left. It would have been easy to stay,” Fonda said of her relationship with Turner.
Turner had an unexpected friendship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, bonding over hunting and arguments about politics over rum and cigars. A once bitter rival who compared Fox’s Murdoch to Adolf Hitler, they later reconciled over a mutual concern over the environment.
Turner built a sports empire, at one point owning professional baseball, basketball and hockey teams in Atlanta. He was best remembered at the helm of the Atlanta Braves, turning the doormats into postseason regulars by the 1990s. Their stadium, built for the 1996 Olympics, was named Ted Turner Field. The Braves replaced it in 2016 with a newer stadium north of Atlanta.
Perhaps Turner’s greatest love was for the land. He acquired millions of acres in ranches complete with roaming buffalo and was Nebraska’s largest private landholder. He spoke often of reviving the West’s bison herds, and in 2002 started a restaurant chain serving bison burgers, Ted’s Montana Grill. Researchers at Texas A&M University credited his donation of a few bulls in 2005 with helping increase the genetic diversity of the last herd of southern Plains bison.
He had a net worth of $2.5 billion in 2023, but had dropped off Forbes magazine’s ranking of the 400 richest Americans in 2021.
During a stock market bust, Turner’s net worth went from nearly $10 billion to about $2 billion in two-and-a-half years.
“To put this in perspective, I lost nearly $8 billion in 30 months,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Call Me Ted,” in 2008. “That means that, on average, my net worth dropped by about $67 million “per week,” or nearly $10 million “per day, every day, for two and a half years.”
He had enough time, and money, to devote to such lofty goals as promoting world peace and protecting the environment.
“See, my life is more an adventure than a quest to make money. Adventure is going out and doing something for the pure hell of it,” Turner once said. “You just want to see if you can do it, period. There’s no thought of gain other than your own satisfaction.”
Through the years, Turner’s antics occasionally overshadowed his business activities.
Fresh from skippering his boat “Courageous” to the America’s Cup title in 1977, a very inebriated Turner was captured by TV cameras stretched out on the floor at the victory celebration.
Turner managed to insult many with his shoot-from-the-lip style. An atheist since his only sister died of lupus at age 17, he called Christians “losers” and “Jesus-freaks,” later apologizing for both remarks.
He once suggested in a speech that unemployed Black people be used to haul mobile missiles with ropes “like the Egyptians building the pyramids.” After civil rights leaders demanded an apology, he said he was just joking.
Other times, his humor saved him from potentially awkward situations, like when he talked to an audience in Berlin in 1999. “You know, you Germans had a bad century,” Turner said, according to The New Yorker. “You were on the wrong side of two wars. You were the losers. I know what that’s like. When I bought the Atlanta Braves, we couldn’t win, either. You guys can turn it around. You can start making the right choices. If the Atlanta Braves could do it, then Germany can do it.”
Turner, father of five children, grabbed a leadership role in American philanthropy with his Sept. 18, 1997, pledge to give $1 billion, or $100 million a year for 10 years, to United Nations charities. Even as Turner’s fortune shrank after the AOL Time Warner merger, he continued giving money to the U.N., calling it the best hope for peace.
He promoted a range of humanitarian causes. Turner joined former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn to start the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a U.S.-based nonprofit dedicated to reducing the threat of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Turner fretted publicly about the world’s problems.
“If I had to predict, the way things are going, I’d say the chances are about 50-50 that humanity will be extinct in 50 years,” Turner said in 2003. “Weapons of mass destruction, disease, I mean this global warming is scaring the living daylights out of me.”
As he poured millions into nonprofits on a global scale, Turner was also fond of spreading his wealth in small ways. He once gave $500 to a volunteer fire department that helped extinguish a blaze on one of his ranches. Another time he lent personal paintings for an exhibit at a Bozeman, Montana, museum.
Former Associated Press correspondent Ryan Nakashima contributed to this report.
FILE - Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner holds up the World Series trophy on the field at Atlanta Fulton County Stadium after the Braves won the 1995 World Series, Oct. 28, 1995, in Atlanta. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)
FILE - Actress and political activist Jane Fonda and media mogul Ted Turner arrive at a party in support of Proposition 128 in Los Angeles on Nov. 6, 1990. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon, File)
FILE - Actress Jane Fonda and CNN founder Ted Turner pose together at the United Nations Foundation Global Leadership Dinner, Nov. 6, 2013, in New York. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow, File)
FILE - Ted Turner is seen at his desk inside the CNN Center in 1982. (Nancy Mangiafico/Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP, File)
FILE - Ted Turner speaks during the CNN World Report Contributors banquet in Atlanta on May 4, 1995. (AP Photo/John Bazemore, File)
