Brick by Brick: Chris Paul (Part 2)
In Part 1, we dug into what makes Chris Paul a special player on the court. In Part 2, we’ll look at the overall arc of his career and see where the popular narrative might miss the mark. We’ll get the big red mark out of the way right off the bat — Chris Paul has never played in the NBA Finals. He didn’t play in a Conference Finals until his 13th season, when he was no longer the best player on his team. Neither of these things are indisputable, but as is so often the case, there’s much more to Paul’s career than what you see on a stats page.
When Paul was drafted by the Hornets in 2005, the team wasn’t the only thing that was rebuilding; Paul played most of his first two seasons in Oklahoma City as the city of New Orleans recovered from Hurricane Katrina. In his first season, the Hornets were projected to win around 21 games, but instead won 38, largely on the back of Paul’s Rookie of the Year-winning season. Two years later, with the Hornets projected to win around 38 games, they won 56 — still a franchise record. It was the perfect storm for the franchise: the team’s first year back in New Orleans, the All-Star Game was played in NOLA, a #2 seed, a pair of All-Stars (Paul and David West), and an All-NBA First Team for Paul. The Hornets beat an underperforming Mavericks team in 5, then lost a tight series against the reigning champion Spurs, a 7-game grind in which both teams scored the exact same number of points. It seemed like the first step for a young team with a 22-year old stud and another two starters just entering their primes. But it wasn’t to be.
In the 2008 playoffs, Paul averaged 24/5/11 with 2.3 steals. He led all players in assists/game, steals/game, PER, Win Shares/48, and BPM. He was 5th in Win Shares in just 12 games; the only players who finished ahead of him, Kobe Bryant and the Celtics Big 3, played 21 and 26 games in the playoffs respectively. Those numbers aren’t one-offs for CP3 either. Among players with 50+ career playoff games, he ranks 5th in PER, 5th in WS/48, and is tied for 3rd in BPM. Granted, these numbers will likely decrease in the back half of his career, but there’s very little chance he won’t remain in the top echelon of career playoff performers.
The reason these numbers are worth mentioning is because, somewhere along the line, Chris Paul got a reputation as a playoff choker. For a certain subset of NBA fan, results are everything. It doesn’t matter to them that Paul faced elite teams in the first and second rounds. It doesn’t matter that the teams that eliminated his teams won an average of 55.5 games. Or that of the two times Paul was eliminated by a team with fewer wins, one was against the 2018 Warriors. The other was a 2016 first round series where the Clippers lost to the Trail Blazers in 6 games; Paul only played in 4 of those games, as both he and Blake Griffin sustained injuries in game 4, and the Clippers would drop the next two without them. In that series, CP3 averaged 24/4/7 with 2.3 steals per game, and 4 turnovers — 4 total turnovers, not per game. He shot 15/15 from the free throw line and had a PER of 33.
Yes, Paul’s teams have often struggled in the playoffs, but to put that blame at his feet is nothing short of willful ignorance. As a pure point guard, Paul is in one of the most difficult positions to carry a team as an individual player. Looking back on the players we stacked Paul up against in part 1, Steve Nash also never played in the Finals. Jason Kidd went to three Finals, but the two he made in his prime were in a dreadfully weak Eastern Conference. The 2001–02 Nets were the #1 seed with 52 games; the next year they were the #2 seed with 49 wins, while the Pistons were tops in the conference with 50. Remember how the teams that eliminated Paul from the playoffs won 55 games on average? During his six years in New Jersey, Kidd’s playoff opponents averaged 45 wins. In fact, during his Nets tenure, he only once played an opponent with 55+ wins, when he was swept in the first round in a 1/8 matchup with the 59-win Heat. Isiah Thomas of course went to the Finals three times, winning twice — but he didn’t do it alone. During Thomas’ peak as an individual player (1984–86, when he was All-NBA 1st Team three straight years), he won just one playoff series. John Stockton played with an MVP-level talent his entire career and didn’t get to the Finals until his 13th season, the same point in his career as Paul’s first season in Houston. Really only Magic Johnson can lay claim to having consistently led his teams to the promised land as a point guard, and that was with one of the most effectively managed franchises in league history.
This isn’t to say that playoff success and championships aren’t important; they’re the entire point of the NBA. But to discount a player who has consistently performed at an extremely high level in the playoffs because his teams haven’t been as successful as they might have been is incredibly short-sighted. Paul’s resume is certainly not perfect. If he had a ring or two, he’d undoubtedly be knocking on the door of the highest tier of our list. But overall, he almost certainly has the best career of any player never to play in the Finals, and still merits a high ranking — but where?
Setting the Bar: Paul vs. Stockton
Stacking up Paul next to Stockton is a no-brainer, as both have exemplified the pure point guard archetype in the modern era. Both were the best playmakers of their generation, strong defenders, and capable scorers that also play highly efficient games that look great under the scrutiny of advanced analytics. Where the case for each differs is the nature of their careers. Stockton is the model of longevity — not just for point guards, but for NBA players in general — and holds untouchable records for career assists and steals. Conversely, Paul peaked early in his career, and his level of play, while consistently elite, has fluctuated between pantheon level and merely great.
To start, let’s try to untangle some of the thorns surrounding Stockton’s career. To me, there are two main things that have to be reckoned with Stock: the Malone Effect and the longevity/peak debate. The former is the tougher of the two, so we’ll dive into that first. The fact of the matter is that it’s virtually impossible to separate the careers of Stockton and Karl Malone from each other. Stockton played 18 of his 19 seasons with Malone, 15 of those with Jerry Sloan as head coach. Compounding this problem is the nature of Stockton’s game. Kobe and Shaq certainly benefited from each other in terms of team success, but it’s hard to say that either one explicitly helped the other in terms of play style; sure, Kobe doubtless benefited from the attention that had to be paid to Shaq on the interior and vice-versa, but a possession could play out without one or the other touching the ball and not look too different. With Stockton and Malone, the majority of their respective games were predicated on one play — the pick and roll.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with running pick and rolls, especially when you have a pair as good at running it as Stockton and Malone. And there’s no doubt in my mind that either one wouldn’t have been Hall of Fame-calibre without the other. But when two players are so directly connected, it’s nearly impossible to judge either one in a vacuum. There’s not much question that Malone was the superior player either; Stockton spent virtually his entire career with one of the most effective scorers in NBA history, an 11-time All-NBA First Team recipient and a 2-time MVP. We don’t have play-by-play data to determine exactly how often Stockton assisted Malone, so it’s hard to dig deep to see how much each benefited from their symbiotic relationship. But let’s take a random series — the 1997 Finals against the Bulls, for example. Stock had 53 assists in that series; 20 were to Malone, a full 38% of his dimes. There are tons of caveats to this very superficial analysis: we’re looking at a tiny sample size for Stockton, we don’t have data about potential assists (passes that led to a missed shot), and it still doesn’t ultimately answer the question of who was benefiting from whom. But at minimum, I feel very comfortable saying that an outsized proportion of Stockton’s assists were to Malone, and there’s no way this didn’t help to bolster his assist numbers.
Paul is a beneficiary here as well. In the years he played with Blake Griffin that we have tracking data for (2013–14 to 2016–17), a significant proportion of his passes were to Blake, and around 25% of his assists. But there was never any doubt, even at Griffin’s best, that Paul was the superior player. And Paul played with Griffin for, in essence, five healthy seasons, well under half of his career. We don’t have data for his years with the Hornets, but David West’s numbers more or less speak for themselves. In Paul’s rookie year, he leapt from 12 points per 36 minutes on 44% shooting to 18 points per 36 on 51% shooting. In West’s six seasons playing with Paul, he averaged 19.2 points, and saw declines in both scoring and efficiency after going to Indiana, despite playing with better rosters on paper. Since leaving the Clippers, Paul has become more egalitarian as a distributor, never dishing more than around 20% of his assists to any one player. Would Paul suddenly become the all-time assist leader if he played with a Malone-level talent for his entire career? Certainly not; Stockton’s style was simply more conducive to generating assists than Paul. Paul has the 2nd-most all-time seasons with an assist percentage over 45%, with 9; Stockton is #1 with 17 such seasons. But accounting for all the confounding variables, I feel comfortable saying that even if Stockton is the greatest passer of all time, Paul is at least in the same league with him, while being far superior as a scorer and a primary offensive creator.
The other question to grapple with is Stockton’s longevity, which reigns supreme throughout league history. It’s not just that he holds the career assists and steals records by a huge margin. It’s that, over the course of his career, Stockton played in 1504 of a possible 1526 games. By comparison, Paul has been frequently banged up in his career, missing as many games in his first two seasons alone as Stockton did in his nineteen seasons. But with every passing year, the gap between the two shrinks. Based on Paul’s performance this season, it’s not unreasonable to say he still has something left in the tank. After a three year drought, he returned to the All-Star Game this year for the tenth time, and is on track to make his ninth All-NBA Team. While small players like Paul don’t tend to age particularly well, I think it’s well within the realm of possibility that Paul adds an additional one or two All-Star appearances to his resume, and another All-NBA Team. But as we’ve often said in these articles, we can’t give players credit for what they haven’t done. So let’s see how the accolades break down for each player up to this point in their career.
The two shake out surprisingly close to each other. I certainly was not expecting Paul to come out the winner in terms of win percentage, especially given that his team missed the playoffs three times in his first five seasons. Stockton crushes Paul in playoff wins, but we’ve already litigated Paul’s playoff resume above. Stockton also has the edge in All-NBA Teams, but has just two 1st Teams, both coming during Michael Jordan’s two year hiatus from basketball.
But the most damning figure for me is Stockton’s absence of top-5 MVP finishes. This is the clearest picture of how a player was perceived at the time they played. Granted, there are always other factors, like team wins and narrative, but it provides a solid snapshot of the level of esteem players were held in. And despite Stockton twice being an All-NBA 1st Team, it’s clear that he was never considered a top 5 player in the league. Obviously the Malone factor comes into play again here — he has 14 top 10 finishes, and 9 top 5s — but surely the fact that Stock was at no point considered even the best player on his own team has to count against him.
In the end, I consider this fairly close to a wash. Stockton wins out in playoff success and longevity (although his lack of a ring means that his playoff success only counts for so much), Paul takes the cake in terms of peak performance, and their accolades are more or less equal. To that end, I have to give a very slight edge to Paul here. As we said back in our methodology article, we value brief periods of excellence over sustained periods of greatness. Stockton was great for a very long time, but so was Paul. And when it comes to which of them came closer to achieving true, pantheon-level greatness in their career, Paul wins hands down. To that end, he gets the edge, coming in at #29 all-time on our current rankings.
