Today, 37-year-old Chris Paul is enjoying the last stretch of his NBA career in Phoenix. Somehow, despite all the mileage, CP3 is still one of the best point guards in basketball and his basketball career belongs right up there with some of the best.
While this Phoenix team has gotten him closer to a championship than any other, it’s impossible to forget his run with the Clippers. From 2011 to 2017, Paul was the best pure point guard in the game and, along with his running mate Blake Griffin, elevated the Clippers franchise to the top shelf of the West.
That era feels long over now, but Paul says he still tinks about his run with Blake from time to time. Here is is in a chat with Doug Haller of The Athletic:
Haller: Let’s start at the top. For a point guard, it had to be fun playing with Blake Griffin.
Paul: This always happens in life, but I think I appreciated Blake so much more after the fact. I’ll be on Instagram or YouTube and be looking at clips of when we played together. I don’t think anybody has been as explosive. There was one, and I think it was on a fast break, I like threw it ahead and there’s this picture of him dunking it and I’m walking the other way. It was so fun. I think we played in Utah one year, and we started out like the first 12 or 14 points of the game were off dunks.
Chris Paul thrived with the Clippers in a way he just hasn’t everywhere else. In six seasons with the team, he averaged 18.8 points, 9.8 assists, and 4.2 rebounds per game on 47% shooting.
Chris Paul Reveals Why Clippers Failed To Win A Title During Lob City Era
Even with as great as Paul was in L.A., he ultimately failed to win a title with the franchise and it remains one of the biggest blemishes of his otherwise stellar career.
Paul himself did explain why the Clippers never made a run to the Finals, and it may have something to do with luck.
Paul recently spoke about what went wrong with the team, claiming they were unlucky and that was what they missed to put their hands on the Larry O’Brien trophy.
“Doc used to always say in order to win a championship, you gotta be lucky,” Paul said in the Quibi documentary “Blackballed,” via Farbod Esnaashari of Sports Illustrated. “We never were lucky. I don’t think the Donald Sterling thing had anything to do with our shortcomings as a team. It was definitely a bump in the road, something unexpected, but that’s life.”
Today, the Clippers have a pair of new stars in place of their old, but neither the Clips nor Paul have won a championship since their separation.
This season, in Phoenix, CP3 is hoping to break the cycle and finally do what he hasn’t before. But he’s more aware than most just how hard it is to win at the highest level.
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