![]() ![]() 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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