We awoke to the news that the revolution is over, that the players have won, that the biggest NBA stars have demonstrated just how powerful they are.

We awoke to the news – not a puff of white smoke from a blessed chimney, but a #wojbomb from a hellacious Twitter account – that 2019 NBA Finals MVP Kawhi Leonard is the early frontrunner for 2020 NBA executive of the year by choosing to sign with the Los Angeles Clippers … but only after engineering a trade to acquire Paul George from the Oklahoma City Thunder.

We awoke to the news, to the confirmation really, that NBA superstars run the NBA. They have all the power. They are the winners, the biggest NBA names, along with the biggest NBA cities.

Here in Indianapolis, how are we supposed to feel about that?

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Aside from the gasping, aside from the gawking, aside from the sheer entertainment of the #wojbomb that broke Saturday at 1:55 a.m. when ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski tweeted the news – Kawhi Leonard to the Clippers … and, wait for it, Paul George too – how are we supposed to feel about a game that is tilted away from Bankers Life Fieldhouse?

While the NBA descends on Las Vegas this weekend for the 2019 NBA Summer League, where future NBA executive of the year Zion Williamson of the New Orleans Pelicans played his first game as a pro against future teammate R.J. Barrett of the New York Knicks – as if that won’t happen someday – the rest of the league is pondering its place on the NBA’s roulette wheel. In this game the wheel is numbered 1-30, but some of those pockets are closed, a sucker’s bet. The Pacers? Sorry, Pacers. Your pocket is closed. That little ball is never, and I mean ever, going to fall your way.

Not if the game stays like this. Not if the players have all the power.

And I’m not saying it’s wrong. I’m not. This is one of those stories where everyone has an opinion – The NBA is broken! No, the NBA is great! – and mine is in the first camp. The NBA is broken, and it cannot be fixed. If you’re on the other side and your argument is that NBA players ought to choose where and with whom they play, well, you win. Because you’re right. Players should have that right. I guess.

Pragmatically, I get it. An NBA player is a commodity, yes, but a person. And people who have earned the right to choose where they work – NBA players earn that right by staying in the league long enough to become free agents – can do as they like. Great players want to win as badly as anyone in the league, perhaps more because they are playing for their legacy, and they’ve decided it’s a lot easier if they form these so-called super teams. They have that right.

But for everyone else, specifically for franchises like the Indiana Pacers in towns like Indianapolis, today is not a day to make like Mel Gibson in “Braveheart” and scream: "Freedom!"

Today is the day another guillotine fell.

What is happening around the league is beautiful for a handful of players, but it’s a plague for everyone else. With this news, the idea that a player as humble and quiet and even shy as Kawhi Leonard is just as craven as everyone else – just as willing to exercise the power he has earned – the plague has reached Biblical proportions.

They are gathering in groups now, two by two, marching together toward their ark in pursuit of an NBA championship. Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant chose the Brooklyn Nets. Kawhi Leonard and Paul George picked the Clippers. It took him a year, but player-GM LeBron James acquired his running mate, Anthony Davis, for the Los Angeles Lakers.

Those are six of the 10 or 15 best players in the world, Paul George the least of them I suppose, but he’s coming off a season where he finished second in the league in scoring, and third in MVP balloting. He just left Mr. Triple Double himself, Russell Westbrook, to join forces with Mr. NBA Finals MVP. Leonard met last week with the Clippers, Lakers and incumbent Toronto Raptors, but it turns out the true power meeting happened when he met privately with George to plot the future of the NBA.

Here in Indianapolis, we’re hoping Victor Oladipo’s torn quadriceps tendon heals. We suspect it will, of course, but will he be the same player, the same athlete, he was before the injury? He’d better. He is the Pacers’ only hope, their only superstar-ish guard in a league gone small, on a team gone big. And he cannot do it alone.

Until we awoke Saturday morning, it didn’t seem like Oladipo was alone. Remember how good it felt, watching Pacers President Kevin Pritchard take those ingredients for meatloaf and turn it into a steak dinner – landing an NBA Draft lottery talent with the No. 18 pick in Goga Bitadze, and acquiring three proven shooter/scorers in Malcolm Brogdon, Jeremy Lamb and T.J. Warren?

It felt like the start of something, a solid but aging Pacers franchise getting younger and more skilled in a matter of days, a better team on paper than they were a year ago when they won 48 games. It felt like that slogan the Pacers have been telling us: We Grow Basketball Here.

Now, today – and maybe only for today, but today is here and it arrived ominously, like the words “winter is coming” – it feels like the Pacers are left out. On the bright side, they are not alone. If your team is not in Los Angeles, if it is not in New York, if it is not seen as the ultimate destination for today’s discerning NBA superstar or does not luck into the proper Ping-Pong ball in the draft lottery, today feels empty.

Does this feel like sour grapes? Maybe it is. Maybe it should be. Winter is coming. And around here, grapes don’t grow.

Find Star columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.