Chris Paul (finally) joins the 20-20 Club

On its face, Chris Paul’s relatively late inclusion into the illustrious 20-point, 20-assist pantheon is something extravagant, something that’s never been done before in recorded NBA history. After all, while the 20-20 game had been accomplished 56 times by 21 different players since the 1983-84 season, none of those statistical dynamos did it with a flawless zero turnovers. And that’s what Paul pulled off on December 10, 2016: 20 points, 20 assists, and zero turnovers in just 30 minutes of play.

I want to want to fire off pistols and fireworks like Bang! And Wow! And WoooooooooWeeeeeeee! No one, not Magic Johnson or John Stockton; the lords of the 20-20 (apparently referred to as the LASIK) club with 14 appearances (Magic) and 11 (Stockton) ever did it with zero turnovers. Two of Stockton’s 20-20s included just a single turnover and Tim Hardaway once went for 27-20-1. Back in 2002, Andre Miller went for 27-points, 19-assists, and zero turnovers and as masterful as that performance was, it wasn’t 20-20-0. Nope, Chris Paul is the new belle of the point guarding ball, a princess who hides a dazzling dress beneath an ankle-length overcoat and only when the time is right breaks it out like, “Oops! Pow! Surprise!”

Alas, when you strip away the numbers and history, when you isolate the context and the watch the plays unfold, Paul’s achievement has all the excitement of Floyd Mayweather dismantling Andre Berto in a one-sided, risk-free, blowout. Which is to say it’s the essence of practicality, a case study in nuance and exploitation.

The Clippers’ opponent on this starry Saturday night was the hapless New Orleans Pelicans. They are a ragged bunch of stopgap players surrounding Anthony Davis, but on this evening Davis was resting. Jrue Holiday and E’Twaun Moore joined him on the bench in street clothes which meant the Pels were without three of their core guys. Davis leads the league in blocked shots, leads his team in defensive rating and pretty much anchors anything the Pelicans do. On the season, New Orleans is a bottom-ten team in opponent turnover percentage while the Clippers are top-five in protecting the ball. And with the Clippers coming off a home court drubbing to Golden State, there was added motivation to rid themselves of the post-vomit taste and cleanse.

The Clips may have been without their burly, sardonic power forward Blake Griffin, but what does it matter when their offense is orchestrated by a player with a career assist-to-turnover ratio over 4.0? From the tip, Paul was cool as a fan, picking up five assists in the first quarter. He found backcourt mate J.J. Redick three times on a variety of plays: the first, a Redick cut, the second Redick on the wing, and then Redick coming off a screen. He had an obligatory lob to DeAndre Jordan, and his fifth assist was most indicative of the Pelicans weaknesses and how Paul and the Clips would abuse them.

Here you can see Paul exploiting Alexis Ajinca, who is either unaware that Mareese Speights can hit the open 3-pointer or just displaying a lackadaisical approach to a closeout. Whatever the case, the result is predictable.

Ajinca wasn’t the only victim and pointing out suspect defense isn’t meant to downplay Paul’s accomplishment. Rather, the ease, and almost casual execution belies something that’s closer to premeditation. Paul’s out here playing multi-dimensional chess while his opponents struggle with checkers. In both the clip above with Ajinca and the clip below with Terrence Jones, the Clippers load up on the opposite side of the floor and leave Paul alone to carve up the defense with Speights as his outlet. Tim Frazier attempts to funnel CP baseline and in both cases, Paul draws in slow-footed defenders who compound the over-help with miserable closeouts. There’s a third version of the same play here where the Pels are quicker on the rotation, but sending the six-foot-one Frazier at Speights has the result you’d expect.

It seemed like Paul simplified the hell out of the accomplishment after the game when he said, “We were just running the same play over and over.” But he just described the game as it was. With Paul at the helm, Los Angeles put the Pels through a cycle and pressed repeat. Six of his 20 assists were to Speights and of those six, three were on the exact same play. His own attack was diligently selective. While he led the team with 16 field goal attempts, 11 were tracked as uncontested; just Paul taking what the defensive gave him, an evolved basketball application of judo’s weight and leverage shifting. For a player well-known for being physical, there’s no sense of force to his game, no press or urgency, just dulling, relentless method highlighted by an all-time level of being able to identify and exploit vulnerability while simultaneously mitigating risk.

And like Mayweather, no basketball player mitigates risk like Chris Paul. We’ve become accustomed to associating competitive greatness with what borders on an unhealthy motivation, but picking up techs because you disagree with scorekeepers goes beyond perfectionism and into obsessiveness of fairness and accuracy. Paul spoke of that nature to The LA Times, “The first thing I look at every game, how many turnovers. I’ve been getting techs in games because I had a turnover or something like that that I didn’t think was a turnover.”

For all his greatness, he plays it safe with a running tally in his; but calling it safe isn’t to say boring. In this one game there were behind the back passes, precision pocket passes, lobs. It all comes within the broader framework of getting easy buckets — and having an allergy to turnovers which, Paul points out, “when you have as much firepower as we have, a turnover takes away that opportunity.”

So there’s attention to detail, concern with opportunity cost, risk mitigation, obsessive bookkeeping. I’m not here to call Chris Paul the accountant, but there’s something of an accountant to his game and game management. That bundle of attributes along with the obvious master class in passing, ball handling, and athleticism is what allowed him to not just join the 20-20 club, but to do it in a most CP3 of styles. But while we’re getting techs over mislabeled turnovers, go back and watch the tape. At least three of those assists probably shouldn’t have counted, but even the meticulous among us can accept the occasional bookkeeping error if it benefits the bottom line.