NEW ORLEANS -- A whole league's worth of players can't wait to go out at night and answer this one for themselves: What's life really like in the Big Easy?

This much we can share from the land where Cajun spices dance irresistibly in butter and oil: It's the kind of place where the most despised man in Charlotte can go out in public without disguises, make plans to attend his team's home games and book 40 speeches in the month of October alone, because the locals keep asking him to come talk to them.

Yep. Sure is wild in that French Quarter.

They've actually welcomed George Shinn down here.

	George Shinn, left, may have come to a decision on Paul Silas' future with the Hornets before the playoffs.

"It's been tremendous," Shinn said, stopping in the hallways of New Orleans Arena for the kind of interview he had stopped granting at Charlotte Coliseum. "It's been sort of like a resurrection for me.

"I created a lot of hell on my own (in Charlotte). And a lot of assistance I got from others. A lot of the leadership in Charlotte didn't come up to help when they could have. But who's to blame? I don't know and I'm not worried about it. It's in the past and that's where I put things in the past -- behind me. I'm excited about New Orleans, and I wish everybody in Charlotte the best. Life must move forward, and that's what I'm doing with it."

What the people of Charlotte wish upon Shinn can't be printed, not in this family pocket of cyberspace. Judging by the Hornets' early list of injuries, though, those Shinn voodoo dolls are working on almost everyone employed by the controversial owner. Either that or Charlotte's spurned populace has hired that girl with the computer -- you know, the one from the car-insurance commercial -- to buckle the guys' knees and tweak their reflexes.

A few weeks into their Bourbon Street honeymoon, Shinn is seemingly the only Hornet unscathed so far. Baron Davis (back), Jamal Mashburn (knee), P.J. Brown (ankle), George Lynch (neck) and Courtney Alexander (hip) have all been missing practice time, and Elden Campbell finally opted for arthroscopic knee surgery Friday after failing to participate in a single training-camp workout.

Not the start, obviously, the Hornets envisioned in New Orleans. Hoping to finally silence the question that has haunted this franchise for years -- What next? -- they've instead staged the sort of camp where David Wesley leaves the building one night raving about Mashburn's recovery from last spring's mysterious bout with vertigo ... only to see Mash on crutches the first thing next morning.

"We've all been talking about how deep we were," Wesley said. "Just that quick, we're not as deep as we were."

It's that depth which purportedly has the city so excited and which obscures Shinn's history of enraging the public. New Orleans hasn't had an NBA team since 1979 and there was never a Jazz team here that had the potential to do as much in the Eastern Conference as these Hornets. If healthy.

Davis is a franchise point guard, and coach Paul Silas has multiple options at every other position. Wesley and Courtney Alexander at shooting guard, Mashburn and Lynch at small forward, Brown and Lee Nailon at power forward, Campbell and Jamaal Magloire at center, Stacey Augmon and Robert "Tractor" Traylor as intriguing extras. In today's NBA, especially in the pitiable Leastern Conference, that's unrivaled depth, New Jersey included.

Coupled with the expected energizer of playing somewhere new, where they're actually wanted, the talent riches available to Silas have made the Hornets a trendy pick to unseat the Nets as the East's representative in the NBA Finals. Especially after a summer in which Shinn offered the $80-plus million max to Davis and managed to get Davis to sign the contract. That only happened, mind you, after Davis saw his hometown Clippers trade for Andre Miller, but no matter. This was serious progress for Shinn, whose litany of problems in Charlotte started because he stopped paying players and began trading the ones who were either making money or those who were due raises.

A closer look reveals that Silas suddenly has a group with some continuity. Alexander is the lone newcomer; the rest of the rotation Hornets have been together for two or three seasons. "Something we haven't had in the past," Silas admits.

It should be a treat for New Orleans, too, compared to getting an expansion franchise. Or a team at the bottom, as Memphis inherited with the Grizzlies. Of course, that depends on the severity of Silas' many injuries, with the coach himself feeling the effects as much as anyone.

Silas held the Hornets together masterfully in the face of the Bobby Phills tragedy, and again during last season's lame-duck waddle through the schedule, which saw the Hornets fare better on business travel (23-18) than they did before near-invisible crowds at home (21-20). Problem is, Silas is in the final year of his contract. And already there are more problems.

There are injuries. There are expectations, which could also be seen as leaguewide impatience with the Hornets' inability to get past the second round, no matter how many times someone in the media tabs them for the Finals. There are likewise several quality players to keep happy, the flip side of being so deep. Alexander has struggled with sitting since he arrived in the league. Nailon and especially Magloire have been pushing for more time as well.

"(Relocation) was like a dark cloud that hovered over us all season long," Silas said. "You just can't have that kind of negativity. Even though we weren't a direct (cause) of it, it affected us.

"But, barring injuries, I certainly think we're right up there (now). You have to look at New Jersey and Boston and Detroit first, but barring injuries, we have the size. We've been together long enough. We have the know-how. We have everything that's needed to be right up there."

	“	I think the skeptics are wrong (about New Orleans), but we'll see. I've heard people say you'll fail the first year and I've heard people say Year 3 or Year 4. But they said the same thing in Charlotte, and we had 14 good years there. ”
		— George Shinn

As for finding minutes for all the talent, Silas said: "If we win, I don't think we're going to have very many problems at all."

Shinn, meanwhile, says all the same stuff, even when you remind him that New Orleans previously proved so economically incapable of sustaining the Jazz. Fan apathy was similarly pronounced in 1984-85 when Atlanta played a dozen games in a New Orleans college gym, dispelling the notion that only the cavernous Superdome -- too big to work as a basketball venue -- forced the Jazz move to Salt Lake City.

So happy that he's legitimately wanted for 40 speeches in a single month, Shinn downplays the modest crowd of just more than 11,000 for the Hornets' exhibition debut Friday at N.O. Arena. He's even vowing to turn a profit in Season 1.

"A lot of people are under the misconception that as soon we went to Charlotte it was a sellout and continued to be," Shinn said. "In the beginning we sold out Opening Night and then in November and December we didn't sell out.

"I think the skeptics are wrong (about New Orleans), but we'll see. I've heard people say you'll fail the first year and I've heard people say Year 3 or Year 4. But they said the same thing in Charlotte, and we had 14 good years there. And then it fell apart."

All of Charlotte will always say the blame is Shinn's, pointing to his poor record of keeping star players and the sordid sexual-harassment allegations (of which Shinn was cleared) and how he bought out the local businessmen who helped him finance the Hornets' original expansion agreement. Only now, Shinn doesn't have to listen any more. In New Orleans, he's finding it easy to talk again.

Wild place, huh?

Marc Stein is the senior NBA writer for ESPN.com. E-mail him at marc.stein@espn3.com.