Revisiting the Chris Paul Conundrum
CP3 will retire as an all-time great whose playoff résumé never matched his statistical brilliance — reopening the debate over what his career reveals about point guards.
A true era of NBA basketball will be coming to a close this season, with the reports coming out that Chris Paul, the Point God, is retiring at the end of the year. Paul will leave the game as the NBA’s second-ranked player in career assists and steals,1 in addition to being one of the league’s most frequent All-Stars and most decorated players overall. The debates will surely commence around where exactly CP3 ranks in the pantheon of historical point guards — my money is still on Magic Johnson — but there is no doubt he belongs near the top of the list.
However, there is another theme of CP3’s career that is unavoidable, what I called “The Chris Paul Conundrum” in this 2016 story:
The Chris Paul Conundrum
Few point guards in NBA history have the résumé to go toe-to-toe with Chris Paul of the Los Angeles Clippers. So how can it be that he’s never played in the conference finals?
The core of the Chris Paul Conundrum is that CP3 grades out as an all-time legend by every advanced metric we have… and yet, his teams’ postseason results resemble those of far less impactful stars. Maybe that’s a Paul problem — but along with leaguewide historical trends, it more suggests that being a contender with a traditional PG as your top star may be a structural disadvantage in the modern NBA.
