Chris Paul's Zuihitsu

Last Sunday during half time of the Mavericks/Hornets game, CP3 disclosed his T-Mobile Fave 5 current point guards to Magic Johnson in one of those congratulatory Sunday afternoon interviews. They were as follows (in no particular order):

-Steve Nash
-Tony Parker
-Baron Davis
-Jason Kidd
-Deron Williams

Ok, that's all well and good... but something about this list seems off. Maybe I'm reading way too much into this, but I think this list speaks volumes as to just how lame CP can be.

Don't get me wrong, I love the dude on the court - throwing the ball through Jason Terry's legs on the fast break was probably one of my favorite highlights of the year - but could he get any more boring off of it?

The above list, over the past week, to me at least, has somehow come to encapsulate everything that I hate about the non-ballhandling Chris Paul. I mean, really? That's your list? It reads like the 5 current point guards with the most all-star appearances (yeah, I know... D-Will) or the 5 most recognizable point guards in the league. (Although, the selection of Boom Dizzle is actually kinda funny seeing as everyone hates Baron Davis now. In the interview, after revealing BD as one of his selections, CP actually piped up in justification of the pick (he didn't feel the need to justify any of his other picks, though) and said something stupid like "he's got great strength.")

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that if I were at a party and somehow got into a conversation about NBA point guards and asked the other participant in the conversation to list their five favorite current point guards and they came up with that list, I would probably stop talking to them and convince myself that they didn't know anything about basketball.




I also have this conception, maybe wrongly so, that NBA players are the ultimate fans of the game. I mean to get to where they are, and the simple nature of the job, they must watch as much basketball as anyone on the planet. So how can CP3, who I'll ironically call one of the top 5 players in the game today, really come up with the above list having watched and broken down more film than I ever will? I guess one explanation would be that he has absolutely no creative or aesthetic sensibility (otherwise Steve Blake most definitely would have made that list), but it's hard to say that because he exudes so much originality on the court, e.g. throwing the ball through Jason Terry's legs.

Although, in the grand scheme of Chris Paul, the list is completely consistent with his whole on-court/off-court, choir boy/warrior duality... I guess I was just hoping that beyond the boyish facade there was some brooding basketball genius within him. That there was some lingering vestige of the basketball player burning inside him constantly like an eternal flame of CP3. Someone who, like his on-court persona, just saw things that no one else thought to see. Someone who's list would include some player that I never realized was awesome until he named him and then a lightbulb would go off in my head and I would have some revelatory moment and I would think to myself, "My God Chris Paul! You've done it again!"