From “Lob City” to “Point God,” Chris Paul’s journey stands out more than his quiet exit.
For two decades, one man appeared clairvoyant.
Dribble right, cross over to the other hand, and his palm would be there, as if he knew the move was coming. He would throw a pass at three defenders and somehow get them to turn the wrong way. Nobody has successfully combined concentration with mind control like Matilda, the protagonist of the Roald Dahl novel. Check into a game with the back of your jersey pouring over your shorts, and he’d spot it before the officials could, reminding the referees that an untucked uniform requires a technical foul.
In point of fact, disregard Matilda. This was Larry David with world-class hand-eye coordination and a jumper.
But no one, not even Chris Paul, could have anticipated that one of the NBA’s great careers would have ended like this.
Friday marked the official announcement of Paul’s retirement. Twenty-one years after his professional career started, his final employer is technically the Toronto Raptors, the franchise that traded for the future first-ballot Hall of Famer earlier this week as part of a salary-cutting move, then released him.
The transaction came only months after the LA Clippers, the organization he once carried from irrelevance to contention, banished him from the team because of personality differences during a disappointing 6-21 start to this season.
Paul looked like he was going to get the ending that basketball legends usually get, and Paul is in that category, whether you think of him as one of the three, five, or seven greatest point guards ever. He had returned to the Clippers, the team with whom he was most associated. He had contemplated retirement for years.
His family remained in Los Angeles throughout his late-career moves from the Phoenix Suns to the Golden State Warriors to the San Antonio Spurs. Paul was finding it too hard to be away from them. This past summer, he returned to L.A., joining an organization that should one day retire his number. He said at the beginning of the season that this would be his last. But he didn’t get his retirement tour.
It’s a reminder that none of us, not even those who obsess over details enough to convince the world they can see into the future, get to write our own stories.
Paul tried. Heck, if there is one piece of Paul’s career to remember, it’s that trying — whether that meant poring over scouting reports, perfecting his jump-shot form, giving up his favorite foods to sustain his body into his 40s or pestering Hall of Famers twice his size — was his brand.
Throughout his career, wherever Paul went, winning tended to follow. The New Orleans Hornets drafted him fourth in 2005, then won 56 games only two seasons later, when Paul finished second in MVP voting. He flipped the Clippers from 50 losses the year before he arrived to a 50-win pace in his first season there. It was, to that moment, the most promising team in franchise history. His Houston Rockets came the closest of any group to taking down the healthy Kevin Durant Warriors. The Oklahoma City Thunder had to delay their rebuild a year before Paul ensured they couldn’t lose enough as long as he was present.
Cam Johnson, a forward for the Denver Nuggets, recalls the moment he realized Paul performed at a higher level than anyone else in his immediate environment. Together, they played for the Phoenix Suns, another team that Paul helped rise to prominence.
Paul, a 6-footer who led the league in steals six times in seven years and deservedly forced his way onto nine all-defensive teams, was guarding fellow perennial All-Star Damian Lillard. Lillard went into a pick-and-roll with his center, Jusuf Nurkić. That’s when Paul deviated from the coverage Johnson expected.
The 12-time All-Star has always been against what many people call “gambling” on defense, where he tries to steal the ball and puts his four teammates in danger if he doesn’t get it. Some defenders are playing blackjack, Paul once told me. Paul is playing poker. He understands the probabilities before his feet move.
Paul’s hand got in the way of Lillard’s attempt to bounce a pass to Nurki when he stepped up on him. As he screamed in joy, he deflected the ball, jumped to cradle it, and called a timeout. This was Paul’s aura with the Suns, reminding anyone who would listen that, as Branch Rickey once said, luck is the residue of design.
He is a basketball fiend, a viewer of the entire NBA slate every off-night. One game is on the television. On the iPad, another goes. He is able to absorb information from multiple games at once and stores observations on player tendencies. In this case, he knew a bounce pass was coming. When Lillard headed in that direction, a coy flip to the pocket was his most common move. Paul had noticed the habit and left his hand in Lillard’s go-to path.
These are the defining moments for Paul’s legacy, or at least they should. Not the abrupt manner in which his career ended. Not the lame “never won a ring” argument.
He could not rip the extreme reactions—sometimes inspired and sometimes negative—from those around him. Paul doesn’t keep his opinions to himself long enough for the Clippers to fire him without taking his paycheck this season. There are also those who attribute their growth to Paul’s presence, such as Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the current MVP. There are the ones who elected him the president of the players’ association.
“He’s flawed like all of us, but he’s probably tenacious enough to beat you anyway,” one of his former coaches told me.
Such is the defining characteristic of Paul’s career.
Not the gargantuan numbers.
Not the fact that he’s second on the all-time assist list and second all-time in steals.
Not that he was a pass-first basketball genius who could also score 30 points on you, especially early in his career, before he suffered knee injuries, when he had more bounce than most people think. Not for the efficiency year after year. For someone whose approach was the opposite of shoot-first, Paul is surrounded by elite bucket-getters in the all-time scoring leaders, wedged between Lillard, Clyde Drexler, Elgin Baylor and Dwyane Wade.
The legacy of Paul shouldn’t even be plays like the one when he swiped the ball away from Lillard. It should be what happened in the moments after.
He yelled, “You gotta watch! ” to no one in particular as he lay on the ground, holding the basketball in a secure grip so that no one could take it from him. Consequently, you must watch!” Johnson still remembers the line. How could he forget a player who was celebrating the reason for a steal more than the steal itself?
That’s quintessential Paul, a thinker, a schemer, a master of minuscule advantages who figured out the answers to the test before any of his counterparts could.
