NBA Season Preivew: Chris Paul and the Clippers still deserve your attention

In a world where change generates interest, the Clippers have stayed the same. But the genius of Chris Paul means the team is still must-watch TV.

I was reading a Deadspin mailbag a few years ago. One of the readers suggested that there was a debate about how people, let’s say, tidy up after. I was dumbfounded.

There are multiple methods?

Apparently a large proportion of the population  — maybe like 40% based upon the response rate — chose to stand up before taking care of business. Hearing this was like waking up from The Matrix and realizing the whole world is a lie.

I was profoundly troubled. If I don’t know these simple, primal fact about how a huge swath of my fellow humans behave and think, what else am I missing?

This wasn’t so different from when I realized there are people who think Chris Paul is flawed.

I don’t know when this began. There is no exact, zero-day revelation date when I discovered this alternative segment of humanity. It probably started slowly.

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As he moved from New Orleans to the Los Angeles Clippers and landed on television more, opinions about his game multiplied in visibility. As he was catching the zeitgeist — or, more accurately, tossing it skyward — while orchestrating Lob City, more and more complaints surfaced on Twitter and talk radio about his whining to the refs.

That is understandable.

Chris Paul is a big, theatrical complainer, and some viewers are disproportionately turned off by such behavior in comparison to other aspects of a player’s on-court demeanor. Which is fine. Sports are not rational. Whatever makes you dislike a player is fine. Ain’t nothing wrong with dislike.

But apparently it wasn’t just that. I started seeing more, unsupportable claims. People were actually questioning his basketball acumen? Were we are talking about the same Chris Paul?

I know.

It blew my mind, too.

Until Steph Curry leveled up into a god who left Mt. Olympus to join humanity, I had never really watched a better point guard than Chris Paul. I saw Magic Johnson enough to consider him better. But I turned 11 about a month before Earvin retired. It’s hard to really trust pre-puberty opinions. That kid was a snot-nosed idiot.

So it’s Chris Paul.

He did his greatest work in New Orleans. Before he got a bit older with creakier knees, the man was a savant, playing an offense like a concert pianist. He did things I had never seen with such regularity and smarts that it bordered on magic.

His teammates weren’t very good though, outside of David West. So the 82-game show he put on didn’t translate to a ton of success when the masses were watching. Lord knows the Hornets … or Pelicans … or Jazz (?) — whatever they called the team he played for in New Orleans — was not on TV very often outside of League Pass circles.

Even in Los Angeles, though, he has been indescribably good.

The conveyor belt of hope-crushing lobs that get dunked during Clippers games have a lot to do with the athletic prowess of Blake Griffin and DeAndre Jordan. But we wouldn’t see half as many if it wasn’t for the genius of Paul. He creates angles and understands space so much better than anyone else in the game that he is the catalyst. Defenders are not just leaving Blake and Jordan. Nor are those two merely jumping over rim protectors. They are becoming open enough for alley oops because of the tiny, almost-imperceptible movements, hesitations, feigns, mis-directions, eye movements, ball fakes, and other brilliant techniques — largely unknown to other basketball players — employed by Chris Paul.

Their out-of-control jumping ability and poise while rolling to the rim do allow for sloppier passes. But more than anything else, the unstoppability of these offensive sets are about Paul running the pick-and-roll. It is about Paul being better than everyone else in this facet of the sport. It is about Paul putting defenders in a torture chamber. It is about Paul forcing all five defenders to make decisions — while at the same time maneuvering in a way that leaves them in a position where none of those decisions are any good.

This is how the Clippers have ranked in offense since CP3 came to town:

2011-12: 4th
2012-13: 4th
2013-14: 1st
2014-15: 1st
2015-16: 7th

Four top five finishes in five seasons — twice at number-one overall — and one time falling out. And in that one off season, they still finished seventh — with Blake Griffin only playing in 35 games. This is all the more special if you put stock in the Clippers’ legacy of being the worst franchise in NBA history until Paul came to town.

Unfortunately for him, and the only reason the nonsense questions about his ability can persist, the playoffs have featured bad luck and poor showings.

Most notably, there were games featuring late turnovers by CP3 that cost Los Angeles a victory and the infamous fourth-quarter collapse to the Houston Rockets. All the worse for CP3, that second black mark came not long after it looked like he had shut up his critics forever.

He sent the San Antonio Spurs — the SPURS — home with a Game 7 game-winner. Very few people have ever done that. He left just one second on the clock, too, making it about as clutchy as a clutch shot can be. But not long later came the embarrassing end to the Rockets series. They were up 19 late in a closeout Game 6. Then they lost. Who does that? Dropping Game 7 a few days later added injury to insult, and CP3’s earlier heroics hardly seemed to matter anymore.

Like his team’s annual finish among the NBA’s best offenses, however, it did still happen. The Game 7 game winner mattered and cemented a level of greatness — even if a few holdouts want to continue pointing to bad moments as they comically cling to fairy-tales about his inability to win.

Now, pushing 32 years old, the story is probably not changing.

Chris Paul likely has a few seasons left at god level. The Golden State Warriors exist though. Injuries aside — and we know the Clippers are the ones usually on the short end of that stick — this “Let’s Keep The Band Together” Los Angeles squad isn’t going to get past Curry and Kevin Durant. You wish there was more to the Clippers season than this.

Fans of the team certainly believe there is. But the wider view of the NBA will only have so much room for storylines this year. And the ongoing regular season brilliance of the Clippers, while fun to watch, won’t be able to hold up next to the flash and pizzazz of the Warriors nor LeBron’s quest to somehow knock them off again.

Amid the other B-Plots, the Clippers are just too familiar and too well-understood already to be interesting. The new-look Boston Celtics or Indiana Pacers may draw some headlines. Russell Westbrook going it alone in Oklahoma City will surely be compelling.

But the Clippers, after understandably choosing to roll out a similar team to last year, are just going to keep humming along, destroying most — but not all — and remaining in that unfortunate grouping of the best teams to never make the Finals. They will be there beside the Chris Webber Sacramento Kings and Steve Nash Phoenix Suns.

My recommendation: Watch them as much as possible anyway.

Chris Paul is a special, (less-than) once-in-a-generation talent. He does things nobody else can or has. In a world were rings and change garner the most attention, the runner-up-level, stagnant Clippers are unlikely to get as much as they have in previous seasons.

But they should still keep garnering the attention of your eyeballs.

You only have so many more years left to watch Chris Paul play basketball. Don’t miss that opportunity.