There’s a pretty wide disparity between the perception and reality of “clutch” basketball. We tend to believe it’s almost genetic: some players and teams have a clutch instinct, while others don’t. The truth is more nuanced than that. Really, clutch performance encompasses such a tiny sample that it can look almost random. Last year’s Bulls had a higher clutch net rating than last year’s Celtics. The 2022-23 Mavericks who missed the playoffs went 26-29 in the clutch. The 2023-24 team that made the NBA Finals with a pretty similar group of players went 23-9. It may not be fully random, but clutch performance is rarely consistent.
Unless, for the past few decades, you’ve had Chris Paul. The 2016-17 Houston Rockets finished 18th in clutch net rating. Then they got Chris Paul and finished first in the 2017-18 season, outscoring opponents by 27.1 points per 100 possessions in those minutes. The 2018-19 Oklahoma City Thunder finished 11th in clutch net rating. Then they got Paul and finished first in the 2019-20 season, outscoring opponents by 24.4 points per 100 possessions in those minutes. The 2019-20 Phoenix Suns finished 21st in the NBA in clutch net rating. If you’re sensing a trend here, you’ll be disappointed. It actually took Paul two whole years to lead them to the NBA’s best clutch net rating, a staggering +33.4 in the 2021-22 season. All he managed in his first season in Phoenix was a meager trip to the NBA Finals.Â
Between his first All-Star season in 2008 and his last in 2022, Paul won 65% of the NBA-defined clutch games he played in. During that same window, LeBron James won 64.2%. Apply the same criteria of first All-Star selection to last to other contemporaries like Kevin Durant (59.6%) and Stephen Curry (60.5%), Paul still comes out on top. In the 21st-century NBA, there was no easier path to winning close, regular-season games than having Paul on your team.
Chris Paul to retire: Clippers point guard, 12-time All-Star, stepping away at conclusion of 2025-26 season
Cody Nagel
That dreaded, two-word qualifier is what will stick with Paul after he retires, which we now know will be at the end of the 2025-26 season. You don’t really get credit for doing it in the regular season if you can’t match it in the playoffs. Paul has never won a championship. Barring either a remarkable turnaround by the Clippers or a trade we don’t foresee, he’s going to retire without a ring. Even if he gets one this season, well, it’s hard to see it meaning all that much. Paul has been in and out of the rotation for the Clippers. The star he once was is long gone. He is destined to join that ignominious list of the greatest players never to win a championship.
And he’s an exceedingly frustrating addition to it. He isn’t his former and current teammate, James Harden, with a lengthy track record of elimination game disappearing acts. His effort and conditioning never waxed and waned like Charles Barkley’s. There’s no great flaw here, no defect that deprived him of glory. Paul was great at just about everything. He’s tied for the seventh-most All-Defense selections in NBA history… as a guard listed at 6 feet tall (and probably an inch or two shorter). He’s flirted with 50-40-90 shooting seasons, led the NBA in assists five times while practically never turning the ball over and even rebounded exceptionally for a guard. He’s a basketball genius, so aggressive in seeking advantages that he once convinced an official to call a technical foul on an opponent because his jersey wasn’t tucked in. He is the very definition of a winning player. He just never actually got to win.
He bears some responsibility for that, of course. The 2014 collapse against Oklahoma City, for instance, was an absolute debacle. Paul turned the ball over twice in 17 seconds and fouled Russell Westbrook on a 3-pointer while up by two, leading to the worst loss of his playoff career. But James has the 2011 Finals. Kobe Bryant had 2004. Every legend has a stain somewhere on their resume. They tend to clean it off with their victories. And the stars just never quite aligned for Paul, often for reasons outside of his control.
How many stars have had a trade voided by the league? If David Stern hadn’t killed his trade to the Lakers, he likely would have gotten at least one ring in purple and gold because, well, everyone does. It might’ve come alongside Bryant in the twilight of his career, or it might’ve come in the next iteration of the team. Instead, he was traded to the cursed Clippers. Blake Griffin couldn’t stay healthy and Donald Sterling was forced to sell the team.
Even still, he had a real chance at the 2015 title in Los Angeles. He’d just slain the defending champion Spurs and led the Rockets by 19 near the end of the third quarter of an elimination game of the second round before Josh Smith and Corey Brewer had the best shooting quarter of their lives to steal the game and ultimately the series. The Warriors were vulnerable at that point. The Grizzlies had just pushed them to six, and the Cavaliers would ultimately do the same without Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love. But Paul, hobbled by an injury, couldn’t prevent one of the most infamous examples of bad shooting luck in playoff history.
Golden State ascended from there and would become the most persistent thorn in Paul’s side, along with injuries. Imagine if the Warriors had won it all in 2016. Might Durant have chosen to play in Los Angeles with Paul, rather than with Curry and the Warriors? We’ll never know. Paul had his share of star teammates, but he never had what Curry and Durant did together, an unimpeachable and nearly unstoppable title favorite.
“Nearly” unstoppable because Paul almost stopped them alongside Harden. Houston led Golden State 3-2 after five games in the 2018 Western Conference finals. But Paul injured his hamstring at the end of Game 5. The Warriors took Game 6 easily on their home court. And then, in yet another example of miserable shooting variance, Houston infamously lost Game 7 at home thanks to a 0-for-27 shooting stretch from deep. A year later, Paul’s relationship with Harden soured, and he got shipped to the Thunder.
Nobody will or should question what happened next. Sam Presti flipped Paul to Phoenix a year later and now he has a budding dynasty on his hands. But it’s hard not to wonder if things could have been different had the Thunder elected not to tank. What could Paul and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander have been doing together for the next few years? Could Presti have used his mountain of draft picks to build a champion around him? We’ll never know. Paul went to Phoenix. He came closer than he ever had before. And then Giannis Antetokounmpo had his superhero moment. The team got COVID and collapsed against Dallas in 2022. And the Paul championship window seemingly closed. Maybe he could have reopened it as a 2024 free agent. He elected to pursue a real role with the Spurs over a backup job with a better team. “I love nothing more than the opportunity to play and contribute and hoop,” Paul said at the time.
He did it as well as almost anyone who’s ever played the game. He’s called the “Point God” for a reason, after all. But as we covered up top, there’s a lot of randomness inherent in clutch performance, and winning championships means winning in the clutch. Paul did as much as humanly possible to put himself in a situation to do that, but even he couldn’t control everything. He wound up being among the unluckier players in recent NBA memory. Play his career 100 times and he’s a champion in 90 of them. Tweak even a single factor — injuries, shooting variance, team circumstance — and he hoists a trophy at some point.
Instead, he joins that frustrating list of all-time greats who never had the chance.Â