Taking away his numbers in garbage time with the outcome decided, he put up 11 points and 9 assists on 3-for-11 shooting and failed to stamp his impact on the game. In Game 6, with a tied game going into the fourth quarter on his home floor, his team still lost. But Chris Paul seems to carry it around with him all game, and I think it becomes more of a distraction for him and his team than anything.” One informed observer posited: “Lots of great players complain about refs. His incessant desire to get questionable calls out of the refs is a distraction to me as a viewer so it may well possible impediment to his postseason success. Purists who are fed up of his flopping, whining ways did not shed a tear for him that night. Paul is a high IQ player, but he out-thought himself here. Had he not been so desperate to go into his patented, ridiculously exaggerated “look at me, I’m shooting from 75 feet!” motion in a back-firing bid to draw a three-shot foul on Westbrook in the backcourt, the Clippers would have sealed the win. Re-live his two turnovers in the final 17 seconds: somehow lost after leading by 7 points with 45 seconds remaining. In the crucial Game 5, Paul spearheaded one of the more memorable choke jobs in recent playoff history as L.A. His biggest failure came last season when, despite a 1-0 lead and a massive coaching advantage, his Clippers still could not get past Oklahoma City in the second round. At his level of apparent greatness, it is only fair to hold him to the highest of standards and judge him by his postseason failures. Paul has been celebrated for a number of years as a top three or four player in the league, and is statistically one of the greatest point guards ever without question. But truly special players find a way to transcend – like Magic did in the 1980 Finals without Kareem and like Isiah did in the 1988 Finals on one ankle. This is by no means an abomination he has spent his entire career in the Western Conference and has generally been eliminated by higher-seeded teams. As he enters the 2014/15 season, his tenth in the NBA, he is still yet to taste life beyond the second round of the postseason. He simply does not have the hardware or team success to bolster his obvious statistical claim to all-time greatness. Of the eight players to average a PER of at least 25 over at least 500 games, Paul is the only one without a title. But, fairly or unfairly he may be the poster boy for that group by pure definition. He is not an obvious “empty stats” candidate like a Kevin Love or a Carmelo Anthony (both great players in their own right), or a Stephon Marbury of yesteryear. Quite simply, his statistical greatness suggests he is already a top-four all-time point guard and a top-25 all-time player, yet in reality there is a severe disconnect between his stats and his résumé. Will Paul ever win one? Or is his game more conducive to piling up stats than winning playoff series? Yet those three won titles – eight between them. A case can be made that the other three – Magic, Oscar Robertson and Isiah Thomas – are the top three point guards in NBA history, so this is the most elite company imaginable. Only two have ever done it more than once: Paul and Magic Johnson.Īs it stands he is among a group of just four players with career averages of 18+ points and 9+ assists. Moreover, only five players have ever averaged 21 points and 11 assists on at least 48% shooting for a season. He is one of just five players to amass 11,000 points and 6,000 assists over his first nine seasons, and he currently ranks first all-time in PER among all guards – not a tell-all stat by any means but one that demonstrates his all-round statistical brilliance. Historically, he is amongst elite statistical company. A true stat sheet filler, he already has 297 double-doubles to his name. He is also a relatively good defender – though not quite fully deserving of his six All-Defense nominations, as I recently laid out here.Ħ17 games into his career, Paul is putting up averages of 18.6 points, 9.9 assists, 4.4 rebounds and 2.4 steals on 47.2% shooting. He is a maestro with the ball, one of the best distributors in recent league history and a multi-faceted scorer. He is a true floor general and orchestrator of his team’s offense. Paul is a four-time All-NBA first teamer and the best pure point guard in the league whose skills are well known to anyone reading this blog. How does he stack up against them given the gap between his stats and his résumé? The statistics place Chris Paul among the absolute greats to ever play his position, but he is yet to experience their level of playoff success.
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