The pursuit of a ring has a strange way of forcing players to face their greatest inner conflicts. Chris Paul’s 18-year career, spanning five—soon, six—teams, has been built and destroyed by his talent for organization, the way he can cull the tempo and exert control over an inherently unruly game. Until, as we’ve witnessed postseason after postseason, he clutches the basketball so hard that the pressure makes it slip out of his hands.
We won’t go over the lowlights today, except to say that many of them have been at the hands of the team he was just traded to. On Thursday, just hours before the 2023 NBA draft, the Golden State Warriors agreed to send Jordan Poole, Ryan Rollins, a top-20-protected 2030 first-round pick, and a future second-rounder to the Washington Wizards in exchange for the once-almighty Point God, who has spent the last week being flung from hypothetical scenario to hypothetical scenario with very little control over his fate.
He has landed in a mind-boggling, near-improbable situation: Chris Paul backing up Steph Curry? The notion is jarring for those of us who remember the days when they were on the opposing ends of a proxy war over the stylistic future of basketball. Paul, the Robin to James Harden’s Batman in Houston, dribbled holes into the hardwood and turned the game into a slugfest, manipulating pick-and-rolls with robotic precision in exchange for wide-open looks for his standstill teammates. On the other end, Steph and Co. were light on their feet, heavy on unpredictable movements and off-ball screening, surrendering to the chaos of the game and cocreating a chart-busting offense alongside it.
The Offer Sheet
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72351244/OfferSheetRankings_Getty_Ringer.0.jpg)
Will Portland finally give in and trade Dame Lillard? We’re keeping a close watch on all of the biggest free agents, trade targets, retirement bluffers, and more in our new offseason tracker.
The Warriors won the philosophical battle and took home the rings, while Paul still searches for his. Their last playoff matchup was over four years ago, before Paul was shipped to the Thunder and then the Suns, who nearly won a title built around the midrange chicanery and end-of-game manipulation that have defined his career. This past season, a 37-year-old Paul looked slower than ever, and even after the Suns traded for Kevin Durant, no matter how precisely they nailed off-dribble 2s, they were pillaged on defense by the 3-pointer. The Point God and his style were aging, archaic. He finished the season on the bench, nursing a groin injury, while the soon-to-be champs blew out the Suns in a Game 6 elimination.
It’s hard to imagine, in this context, that Paul could jell alongside the zippiest team in this era of basketball, but this sport has a way of rewarding the teams that can make their contradictions coalesce. At this stage in both of their timelines, the Warriors might be exactly what Paul needs, and vice versa.
Despite the incorrigibility of Paul’s style, there are very few roles he hasn’t adapted to. He’s been the MVP-level leading man in New Orleans and Los Angeles; the old-head guide in Oklahoma City; Harden’s and Devin Booker’s sidekick in Houston and Phoenix, respectively; and, most recently, the third fiddle learning to spot up and play off the ball after KD arrived. His experience dealing with those variabilities could help him adjust to a role that will likely require him to come off the bench some nights and watch crunch time from the sidelines on others. But this, make no mistake, will be the greatest adaptation he has had to make. Paul is a bona fide future Hall of Famer. Going back to high school, there has never been any doubt that the father of the modern pick-and-roll, the most precise point guard of his generation, would be starting and finishing games.
Adjusting in Golden State will take time, tinkering, and willingness. It would also be in the Warriors’ best interest to embrace Paul’s oversight. A general autopsy of their last season, which sputtered toward a disappointing second-round loss, suggests the supervision of a taskmaster like Paul could be just what the doctor ordered, particularly for the second unit.
Poole thrived as Golden State’s sixth man in 2021-22 alongside Draymond Green, Gary Payton II, and Andre Iguodala, who are cagey playmakers and on-court generals. He suffered when the Warriors let their veterans walk and trusted their young players to take the next step. As the lead decision-maker for the second unit, Poole showed he was better suited as a microwave scorer than a floor general.
As much as Curry catches flak for flinging hasty, above-the-head passes out of bounds, the Warriors’ turnover issues became increasingly precarious the deeper they dug into their rotation last season.
It takes a certain composure—a combination of IQ, experience, and savvy—to find order in such a freewheeling offense. Otherwise, average role players can often exude this confidence alongside the calming force of a generational superstar, the same way young players can seem wise beyond their years in the presence of a grizzled, intelligent veteran. This kind of guidance is what the Warriors lost last year, and the young guys often got swallowed alive by the riptide their pace created. It’s the kind of guidance that Paul once provided to a rebuilding Thunder team, taking future MVP candidate Shai Gilgeous-Alexander under his wing and shepherding the Thunder to the first round of the playoffs.
In finding the right blueprint for Paul, the Warriors could actually borrow from their past, from another former Clippers guard who took a long and winding road to Golden State: Shaun Livingston, whose contributions often gave the Warriors a necessary, timely counterbalance. When the triples weren’t falling and the passes were getting increasingly reckless, there was always Livingston’s midrange mastery to temper the turbulence.
Coming off the bench when he arrived in 2014, he changed the complexion of the Warriors. In his first two seasons, their breakneck pace was at its slowest when he was on the court. He was certainly flanked with more veterans than Paul will be, but they were the more unruly kind. Alongside Iguodala, Livingston helped gird Marreese Speights’s no-shot-is-a-bad-shot game and Leandro Barbosa’s shot-out-of-a-cannon style with a sense of structure. The way Paul demands and commands uniformity on a possession-by-possession basis could leverage Jonathan Kuminga’s 38-inch vertical into enough lobs to help him find a purposeful role in the rotation. Could he feed Moses Moody in the corner enough to help him become a more consistent and reliable shooter? One wonders what he could have done for James Wiseman had he not been traded.
Paul’s arrival also takes a load off Curry, who—despite dealing with nagging injuries—averaged his most minutes per game in the Steve Kerr era this season. There is a certain hilarity to insuring Curry’s potential absence with the presence of Paul, whose injury issues have basically been priced into his value. But they could also potentially help keep each other healthy by easing each other’s burdens. When they play together, Curry can even fling himself off screens while Paul handles the ball, looking for openings off the chaos that the two-time MVP’s movement creates. But the most difficult aspect of this marriage for Paul will be playing off the ball when Curry handles. The guy was just getting used to taking spot-up 3s alongside Durant, and he shot just 31.3 percent on catch-and-shoot triples in the postseason—part of the reason why optimism over this pairing could all just amount to lovely spin.
There is a reason, after all, that the Warriors had to sweeten the deal by trading a 24-year-old they signed to a four-year, $140 million extension less than a year ago. Last training camp, Green threw a punch at Poole, which destroyed the Warriors’ two-timeline approach. Golden State exacerbated the problem by not suspending Green, and Poole’s decline in the coming season only furthered the gap between the young players and the veterans. After a season of watching Poole chuck shots with a level of temerity that even triggered Curry to get ejected, Kerr probably didn’t help matters when he extolled the virtues of all the young players on the Nuggets who were sacrificing individual stats for the sake of winning. But it also sent a clear message: The Warriors were ready to move on from their mistakes.
There’s also the matter of cap relief. Joe Lacob seems sick of consistently carrying one of the biggest payrolls in the NBA, and the NBA’s new collective bargaining agreement will be especially punitive for big spenders. Once Paul’s contract expires at the end of this coming season, the Warriors will have expunged the $95 million they’d have owed Poole from 2024-27, right as restrictions triggered by going over the second luxury tax apron kick in. All the while, this trade probably gives them a better shot at a championship this season, before the wheels fall off the core that carried them to four championships.
The Warriors and Chris Paul are a contradictory pairing, united by the desperation that they created through their own miscalculations. But like a perfectly placed pocket pass from Paul to a rolling big, this partnership could potentially thread multiple needs at once.
