HOW MANY TIMES in the past month have you thought, "Not again -- not another postseason injury for Chris Paul"? At least three: When he hurt a shoulder against the Los Angeles Lakers; when he contracted COVID-19 ahead of the conference finals despite being vaccinated; when he and Patrick Beverley collided in some starburst of boundary-pushing physicality -- resulting in Paul landing hard on his back and wrist.
We were on the verge of ill-timed injuries entering the first or second paragraph of Paul's career obituary.
And then: a 41-point masterpiece to propel the Phoenix Suns to their first NBA Finals since 1993 that doubled as the perfect distillation of Paul's ethos and style.
Paul flopped; he stirred up confrontations; he busted out the Smitty fake spin and his patented yo-yo dribble; he committed zero turnovers, and a preposterously low turnover rate has been maybe the least-discussed ingredient in Paul's hyper-calculated maximizing of every possession; and he hit so many snaking midrange jumpers from the right elbow -- the shot that has defined Paul's career, and made him (yes, the Chris Paul who just made his first Finals in Year 16, playing under a contract Houston Rockets governor Tilman Fertitta labeled perhaps the worst in sports history) one of the great crunch-time players of the past 20 years.
He even untucked his jersey after the last of his seven 3s, and if the referees had any sense of humor, they would have hit Paul with a technical -- a callback to last season, when Paul browbeat officials into whistling the Minnesota Timberwolves for a last-second delay-of-game technical because Jordan Bell checked in with his jersey untucked.
The only thing missing was Paul grifting his way to free throws in the bonus -- conning suckers with rip-throughs, sideways dribbles designed to create collisions, and other dark arts.
But the Paul tic that made me smile widest was a subtle one midway through the third quarter, when DeMarcus Cousins missed a 3-pointer. Patrick Beverley leapt for the offensive rebound, whiffed, and stumbled toward the baseline when Torrey Craig snared the ball. Paul, standing next to Craig, downloaded it right away: If we get moving while Beverley is behind us, we have an edge. He extended his hands for the ball, and by Paul standards, he was calm and measured.
Paul must be the all-time leader in demanding referees kindly give him the damned ball on inbounds plays so he can exploit some advantage he sees but they don't. He bounces on his toes, vibrating with excitement and impatience: Do you not see this? What are you waiting for?
Craig handed Paul the ball, and Paul rifled it ahead to Devin Booker -- the type of co-star perimeter shot creator Paul never had until his short partnership with James Harden. Booker sped up the left sideline, and in the chaos, two Clippers converged -- leaving Craig open for a trailing 3 that put Phoenix up 15. Almost invisibly, from thin air, Paul conjured three points.
A lot of players don't notice those little advantages after rebounding scrums -- tiny windows of space and time that close fast. Some pause too long figuring out how to leverage them. Some notice but don't feel the urgency to capitalize, at least not in ho-hum regular-season games.
Paul feels that urgency every second of his existence.
In the summer of 2017, Houston's coaches were taken aback when Paul in a casual pickup game in Las Vegas screamed out flare screens and stopped play to ask how the Rockets preferred to defend one action. "Chris is a militant," Jeff Bzdelik, then Houston's associate head coach, told me in 2017. "And I mean that in a good way."
Paul's perfectionism is not for everyone. But those who have been around Paul agree on this: His nitpicking suggestions are not about maximizing his points or touches -- not about anything other than what he sees as the best way to win.
He cannot stand to see any edge wasted. It is what makes Paul an irritant, and to some a grating teammate, but it is also what has driven this undersized point guard to historic greatness. The obsessive desire to win every possession is what makes the "Point God." He is a basketball junkie's basketball player.
And now he's in the Finals, with a chance to rewrite his place in basketball history.
BY HIS THIRD season, 2007-08, Paul was an MVP candidate leading a New Orleans Hornets team with legitimate Finals hopes. He closed out the Dallas Mavericks in the first round with a 24-point, 15-assist, 11-rebound triple-double.
The Hornets then lost in Game 7 to the San Antonio Spurs; Paul averaged 24 points and 11 dimes on 51% shooting. Paul today is all slithery guile, but holy hell could young Paul blaze. He had hops. He could somehow change directions in turbo gear without slowing down.
Paul was not 100 percent during the Hornets' first-round loss in 2009. Two years later, David West, the Hornets' leading scorer, tore an ACL three weeks before a first-round matchup with the defending champion Lakers. Paul in that six-game series was about as scintillating as a point guard could be leading a hopelessly undermanned team.
He had incredible crunch-time highs and gut-punch lows during six checkered seasons with the Lob City Clippers -- with injuries upending several playoff runs. He and Tony Allen made crunch time a personal duel in Paul's first playoff series with LA against the Memphis Grizzlies; Paul rained fire late in Game 4, and Allen got the best of him later in that seven-game LA win. Paul was dealing with a hip flexor and a jammed finger, and the Spurs swept LA in the next round.
Blake Griffin sprained an ankle in the next season's playoffs. Then came Paul's one true late-game meltdown -- his in-miniature version of LeBron's 2011 Finals freeze-up against Dallas, the stain that lingers. In a pivotal Game 5 in Oklahoma City in the 2014 conference semifinals, the Clippers blew a seven-point lead in the last 49 seconds.
Paul committed one of the worst turnovers in recent history with about 15 seconds left and the Clippers up two. Russell Westbrook attempted to wrap Paul up in the backcourt -- to foul and stop the clock. Paul could have simply hit two free throws, and iced the game. Instead, he tried to outsmart everyone, lunging into a 75-foot heave in an attempt to draw a three-shot foul. The Thunder stole the ball.
On the ensuing possession, Paul fouled Westbrook on a 3. Paul completed the choke by losing the ball as the buzzer sounded.
That loss -- amid the Donald Sterling scandal -- and the Clippers' collective collapse in blowing a 3-1 lead against the Houston Rockets one year later shaped the perception of Paul in some corners. He was too short, at 6-0, to be the closer, too clever for his own good, unable to lead a team even to the conference finals.
Look what awaited Paul on the other side of those losses: the 2014 Spurs and 2015 Warriors. The first dismantled LeBron's Miami Heat in the Finals. The second became a dynasty.
That has been life in the West. The gap between the conferences shrunk this season, but over Paul's career, it has been wide. Paul shaped those LA teams in his image: precise, methodical, a little grimy. They squeezed a lot from thin rosters light on shooting. In the West, it just wasn't enough.
In between those two catastrophic losses, Paul hit a floater over Tim Duncan with one second left to win Game 7 of perhaps the greatest first-round series ever played -- the 2015 epic between the Spurs and Clippers. A buzzer-beater to win Game 7 is about as clutch as clutch gets, and Paul did it on one healthy leg after straining a hamstring. He missed the first two games of the subsequent series against the Rockets.
Clutch plays in the first round don't carry massive historical weight, and that's fair. The stakes aren't as high. But that 2015 slugfest was the rare first-round clash between two teams with real title hopes. That Paul's shot was sandwiched between two bad LA losses should not blot it from our memories.
And that second loss -- the one to the Rockets -- was not on Paul, playing on one healthy leg. He averaged 26 points and 10 assists on 51% shooting over the final three losses. He was LA's best and most reliable player.
FOR HIS CAREER, Paul his hit 44% of shots in the last five minutes of games within five points -- in a virtual tie for No. 2 (with LaMarcus Aldridge, and behind LeBron) among 18 players who have attempted at least 750 such shots since Paul entered the league, per ESPN Stats & Information research. Narrow the parameters to three minutes/three points, and Paul has hit 41.8% -- behind only LeBron and DeMar DeRozan among 11 guys who have attempted at least 400 such shots over Paul's career. His team's are +348 in those super-clutch minutes -- second only to LeBron.
Paul's combination of accuracy, ball security, and elite free throw shooting has made him an unusually potent crunch-time weapon -- in both volume and efficiency -- for a player his size.
If anything, you sometimes wished Paul could shoot even more. Paul cannot get his shot off at will. He is not LeBron, Kevin Durant, Kawhi Leonard, Michael Jordan -- apex predator wings who lord over the game, and rise into open skies. Bigger defenders can bother him. Sometimes, he has no choice but to pass off. There is perhaps something to the notion that it is hard to win the title when your best offensive player is an undersized point guard -- even harder when that player does not have a taller perimeter scoring tag-team partner.
Those 2015 Rockets defending Paul with late-career Pablo Prigioni and Jason Terry is in some ways confirmation of that. Apex wings would hunt those guys -- bully them, embarrass them, play them off the floor. Paul couldn't quite. That does not mean he lacks some ineffable clutch gene. It just means he's short by NBA standards.
Both Paul and Blake Griffin were hurt in the 2016 playoffs, and when the Clippers fell to the Utah Jazz in 2017, it was over. The Clippers traded Paul to Houston, pairing him with Harden -- the first time Paul had teamed with a perimeter shot creator on his level.
The Lakers had tried to craft that sort of duo in 2011 when they thought they had struck a megadeal for Paul. The trade would have teamed Paul and Kobe Bryant, with the Lakers keeping the players and picks they eventually used to trade for Dwight Howard.
The league office, acting as owners of the Hornets, squashed the trade. The partnership with Harden offered a second chance -- and this new one with Booker a third as maybe Paul's career coda.
Paul in Houston pushed back against the idea he might have trouble surrendering control.
"I was asking for a while to get the ball out of my hands," Paul told me in December 2017.
He deferred to Harden when they shared the floor, and he reverted to Point God mode in his solo minutes. He took pride in his malleability. He tapped into a new gear as an isolation scorer -- an un-Point-God-like adaptation to Houston's ethos -- and it has served him well in a league trending toward more switching.
Paul is, at heart, a craftsman. He might consume more NBA basketball than any player. He texts coaches on off nights, asking if they are watching some particular game and what action they might script coming out of a timeout.
THE LAST TIME I saw Paul in person was in Boston, three days before the pandemic shuttered the NBA. As Paul's Thunder left the arena, he spotted Grant Williams -- then a Boston rookie who played on Paul's AAU team. Paul's eyes lit up. He reenacted some play from the game, taking Williams through some footwork.
Was it performative? Maybe a little. Paul knew media members were watching. Talking heads seem to credit Paul with every speck of progress in Phoenix.
But this is Paul: always on, always thinking, details and alternate strategies whirring through his brain. If skeptics had trouble envisioning Paul in some secondary role in Houston, well, that was their mistake.
The Paul-Harden Rockets came within a game of dethroning the powerhouse Warriors in the 2018 conference finals. Paul made a bundle of clutch plays to help Houston win Games 4 and 5 before straining a hamstring -- and missing Games 6 and 7.
Maybe Paul is a champion today if not for that hamstring tweak, though Andre Iguodala also missed the last four games of that series. It is somehow fitting that in these injury-ravaged playoffs, Paul is finally the star left standing.
The Suns don't have to apologize for beating a Lakers team that lost Anthony Davis in Game 4; the Nuggets without several key players; the Clippers without Kawhi Leonard. Paul played hurt in the first round. (Nor do the Spurs for squeaking past the 2005 Suns with Joe Johnson battling an eye injury, or doing the same again against maybe the best Phoenix team ever two years later when the league suspended Amar'e Stoudemire and Boris Diaw for leaving the bench.)
The Suns rampaged over the Lakers once Davis was injured, and swept Denver. It's not as if they eked those series out. The Clippers series was nip and tuck until the closing blowout -- a Valley-Oop away from perhaps going the distance -- but the top-seeded Utah Jazz (also battling injuries) went 0-2 against the Leonard-less Clippers.
The Lakers with Davis may well have defeated Phoenix. The cold reality is that injuries to top players have marred this postseason more than is typical. For some fans, this championship -- no matter who wins it -- won't hold the same legacy heft. That does not mean it holds none, or is somehow irrevocably tainted. Every season is different. We will remember this one in its own way. We should be able to do that while still honoring the champion, and appreciating the Suns' mettle.
Paul doesn't need this championship for personal validation. He is in or around the top 15 all time in most postseason advanced stats. He's fifth in regular-season assists, and might vault to sixth in playoff dimes during these Finals -- with a chance to leap Bryant, Scottie Pippen, Steve Nash, and Larry Bird.
But it's nice to see any player who gives so much of their life to the game, and plays for so long at such a high level, get a chance at the ultimate prize. Whoever wins the East: Make sure those jerseys are tucked.
Lowe: Chris Paul finally has a chance to redefine his legacy - ESPN Philippines
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