Watching Chris Paul, Who Is Fighting The Future

Chris Paul is still brilliant. During the third quarter of one recent game in Denver, he led Los Angeles on a delayed break, dribbling along the left wing while the Clippers' assorted hyperathletes filled their lanes and the Nuggets tried to mark them. DeAndre Jordan sprinted down the center of the court, conspicuous, and a pair of Nuggets planted themselves in the lane and kept an eye on him, forbidding the Clippers' preferred outcome in this sort of scenario: the breath-catching, stanchion-rattling alley-oop.

With no lob to deposit, Jordan ran to the front of the rim. Paul drove left, beating his man and drawing the attention of one of the two lane-tenders. The other became suddenly occupied with Blake Griffin, who had just stepped inside the three-point line at the top of the key. The weak side of the Denver defense rotated, but Jordan was untended for a moment, if Paul could get him the ball.

With his vision blocked by the stomach of a Denver big man, Paul raised the ball above his head, insinuating a shot, then quickly lowered it to his right hip and snapped a blind, one-handed pass off the Pepsi Center floor. Jordan caught it, finished, and drew a foul, giving the Clippers a five-point lead.

Los Angeles won that night, but the win was a rare bright spot in what has been, so far, a dismal season. Heading into the game in Denver, the Clippers had lost three straight and five of six, and they would lose the next night at home against Utah. Their rebuffed roster has largely failed to jell; the bench issues that have plagued them since Paul's arrival five years ago differ in type, but not in degree.

There is also a more deep-rooted crisis, one that might not be fixed by means as easy as a peripheral trade or a rearranged rotation. Having gotten used to being among the West's yearly contenders, the Clippers presently share a conference with an archrival and prohibitive favorite that happens to be one of the better teams in recent history, led by a category-exploding point guard who makes Paul's manner of play seem almost quaint. And so watching Paul now, directing an almost certainly outmatched team in an style that looks increasingly outmoded, provokes the type of sympathy only a certain zone of thwarted expertise can elicit. It's the same sympathy we feel for second-chair symphony violinists or Nobel runner-ups—geniuses without a champion's luck or timing.

Paul is the second-least physically imposing superstar in the NBA; even in this, he is outdone by Stephen Curry. He stands six feet tall, wrapped in a layer of apparent but not imposing muscle and, with increasing commonness as he reaches his 30s, wearing one of an array of devices or sleeves designed to tamp the effects of some tweak or pull. This season's pain-mitigator is a flexible splint worn around the left index finger that he fractured during the preseason. He is quick but not blink-quick; he shoots well but not lights-out. In terms of pure athleticism, Paul might rate among the bottom third of the league's starting point guards.

Lacking the traditional markers of an all-world basketball player doesn't seem to bother him much. He is a genius of space, and time and strain have not eroded that. Perhaps ten players in the history of the game can match his ability to track everyone on the court simultaneously, and fewer than that share his talent for manipulating the arrangements.

Paul pads around the court at three-quarter speed, running a hundred pick-and-rolls a hundred different ways. His passes to spot-up shooters find the mid-stomach catch-and-shoot target, and his lobs make perfect parabolas. His handle is impeccable, the ball as secure under his control as a football in the sealed grip of a running back. He scrambles defenses so thoroughly that, during the part of a Clippers run when the opposing coach has started thinking of calling timeout, teams often leave him completely untended for an elbow jumper. He almost always makes it.

This is to say: No player is better than Paul at accomplishing his given task. Paul is less a tactician, at this point, than a simple ingredient; when he takes the court, the offense gets good shots. Even during this season's rough start, the Clippers rank sixth in the NBA in points per possession, and after their first-round victory over the defending champion San Antonio Spurs in last year's playoffs, there is the sense that they may well be able to patch things up enough to hang with most anybody by April.

Most anybody, that is, but the Golden State Warriors—the streaking, floor-spreading, screen-switching, three-draining boulder to the Clippers' Sisyphus. The Clippers have played the Warriors twice so far this year, losing a back-and-forth game in Oakland in early November and giving up a 23-point comeback in Los Angeles later that month. The first of these left Paul with a profound existential qualm, at least based on the look of his middle-distance stare during the game's closing seconds. The second served as cruel confirmation.

He has plenty of reason to worry. The Warriors not only seem capable of making the entire season a formality but threaten to push the methods of Paul and the Clippers into obsolescence. Paul and Blake Griffin run a faultless pick-and-roll and come away with two points; Curry and Draymond Green do the same and get three. There is midrange eloquence, and then there is hard math.

Some basketball fans will have a hard time mustering any sadness over Paul's predicament. That's because he is, in addition to being the foremost contemporary practitioner of one of basketball's loveliest idioms, kind of a little shit. Paul's gift for tracing the movements of all of the court's inhabitants does not resolve only in lovely crosscourt passes or well-plotted jumpers; he also refuses to let an opportunity to draw a foul pass him by. He maintains constant communication with referees, draws charges with a well-honed whirly-armed drop-and-shout, and, when he's dribbling, maneuvers into the path of inattentive but innocent opponents just trying to change ends. One such recent midcourt veer caused Anthony Davis to suffer a knee contusion. It is the good fortune of both players that the injury was not as severe as it looked when Davis was carried from the court; the lack of a serious victim keeps Paul's reputation afloat. (Editor's note: Paul is also a serial sports nut-puncher. We love you, Chris, but never 4get).

Even this regrettable tendency, though, reflects Paul's singular position in the NBA. His prowess and his conniving streak come from the same basic trait, the one that lets him see every moment of every possession in total, as if watching from the catwalks lining the arena's ceiling. He is isolated guile, suspended knack. He has realized the fullest version of his approach. It is utterly captivating to watch—and, with Curry and the Warriors to contend with, nowhere near enough.