21–22 NBA Previews: The Phoenix Suns (#5)
Here’s a statistic that might surprise you. If you look at basketball-reference.com’s calculation of career win shares per 48 minutes (if you want to know how it is calculated, you can read about it here), Chris Paul ranks first among all active players, ahead of the following players in order: LeBron James, James Harden, Rudy Gobert, Kawhi Leonard, Kevin Durant, Anthony Davis, Stephen Curry, Jimmy Butler, and Giannis Antetokounmpo.
What this means, basically, is that when it comes down to the stuff we’re capable of counting and measuring on a basketball court, Chris Paul is better than any of his peers. Frankly, he’s better than a lot of guys who weren’t his peers, too. The only players, historically, ahead of CP3 in this catch-all stat are Michael Jordan, David Robinson, Wilt Chamberlain, and the immortal Philadelphia Warriors legend Neil Johnston.
This is surprising because it has never really seemed like Chris Paul was the best player in the league. There were lots of times when it seemed like he was close (he was all-NBA first-team four times), but there have always been players you’d rather have. Some of this has to do with size; it’s just tough to impact winning in the NBA at the highest levels when you are barely six feet tall. Some of it probably has to do with attitude, too; there has been no shortage of ink spilled over the years about the fact that Chris Paul—even taking into account the unselfishness of his floor game—might be kind of hard to play with.
On the other hand, there are lots of things that are not surprising about the notion that Paul might be better than all of his peers, statistically, in a stat that tries to take into account a player’s ability to drive regular season wins. Paul is a one-man organizing principle. He makes life easier for his teammates if those teammates are willing to fall in line. When you have Chris Paul on your team, you avoid turnovers, you get great shots out of the screen-and-roll, and you have solid, low-risk defense at the point of attack. This stuff makes it really easy to go out on a random Wednesday night and beat a run-of-the-mill opponent.
I’ve been thinking about CP and his current Phoenix Suns team quite a bit as I’ve gone through my rankings trying to decide how good each NBA team is relative to one another, and what I’ve started to realize is that conventional wisdom can only take you so far. Chris Paul is great statistically because he’s basically a basketball machine. He’s a computer that spits out the optimal action based on what the consensus has decided is the right way to do things. Two-for-one opportunities, chances to hunt beneficial match-ups, etc.; Chris knows how to harness all the little stuff. He gives you all the little edges.
But when the giants crash into each other, all this little shit might not mean so much. What wins games at the highest level might require a little more inspiration. Winning four playoff rounds against a variety of different teams asks you to do a little gambling. You can’t just optimally take what the defense gives you; you have to bludgeon the defense into giving up what they’re not willing to give up. You have to be a little unpredictable, a little terrifying, a little surprising. This kind of improvisational risk-taking is incredibly un-Chris.
This Phoenix Suns team is excellent. They are excellent on offense and they are excellent on defense. Appropriately, they made The Finals last year at the end of a season in which everyone else kind of sputtered and fell apart. The Suns, as long as they stay reasonably healthy, aren’t going to fall apart. They play consensus-ball. They harness all the most up-to-date conventional wisdom about how NBA basketball works, and they execute that wisdom with remarkable efficiency. They have a prototype point guard, a prototype shooting guard, a prototype small forward, and a prototype center. I’d even argue that in 2021, Jae Crowder is probably a prototype power forward! Most nights, all of these prototypes are going to be enough to win.
The nights that you lose, it’s going to be because you’ve run into something magical. Something like Giannis asserting his overwhelming physicality in ways that run counter to what you’d normally expect to see on a basketball court. Something like Steph Curry’s shooting, or Nikola Jokić’s court-warping passing, or some other display of overwhelming unpredictability we can’t even see coming yet.
When Chris Paul is the driving force of your team, you are going to be incredibly good. You’re going to be so good that the computers might run through all their calculations and suggest that you are the best. You’re going to be as good as good can be—good enough to beat anything you can see coming. You just might not be good enough to beat what you can’t see coming, and inevitably, at some point, that’s just what’s going to come.