If you are a Minnesota Timberwolves fan, as I am, there is a Chris Paul play from six years ago that still haunts you. To call it a “play” is a bit inaccurate, as it wasn’t a play he made, strictly speaking. The ball wasn’t in his hands, and his team at the time, the Oklahoma City Thunder, didn’t even have possession. There were 1.1 seconds left on the clock, and the Minnesota Timberwolves were up two points on the Thunder, with the all-star center Karl-Anthony Towns at the foul line. Under almost every non-miraculous circumstance, the game was over. All KAT had to do was make one of his free throws, and the chances of O.K.C. getting the ball down court in time to make a three became nearly impossible. But Towns missed the first free throw. At that moment, Paul knew something that no one else seemed to remember. The Timberwolves had, earlier in the game, been assessed a delay-of-game warning, after KAT had failed to fully take off his knee wraps before checking in to the game. What Chris Paul also knew was that a second delay-of-game warning would result in a technical foul, which meant a free throw for the Thunder, potentially cutting the lead to one point and changing the shot his team needed to extend the game from a three-pointer to a two. And what Chris Paul noticed was that the reserve big man Jordan Bell had just checked into the game with his jersey untucked.

This is a somewhat silly rule, but to enter the game with a jersey untucked means that players must wait for you to properly tuck your jersey in, and that waiting constitutes a delay-of-game violation. Chris Paul, shouting at the ref while pointing frantically at a clueless Bell, got the call.

The Thunder’s free throw went in and Towns made his second, making it a two-point game, until the Thunder threw an immaculate full-court pass that led to a buzzer-beating layup, sending the game into overtime, which they, of course, won. Minnesota was 10–10 before that game, a promising start to the season following years of misery. After that game, they finished the season 19–45, netting them the first pick in the draft and sending them into a full-team rebuild. I sometimes joke that Chris Paul was the final nail in the coffin for an entire era of Timberwolves basketball.

Paul’s antics are enraging, a bit funny, and a perfect encapsulation of the Chris Paul experience. He can be grating, but it’s because he is so good at using his opponents’ obliviousness against them. In that way, he is the quintessential point guard. It is a position of obsessive observation, of noticing what others do not notice and exploiting it. This attention to detail can be frustrating enough for someone on the losing side, but there is an enhancement of annoyance when the player’s commitment to winning is so great that he is willing to sacrifice his reputation and lean against what some might consider “unspoken rules”—like, for example, pushing a ref into calling a technical foul on a player too lazy to tuck in his jersey. Your mileage may not be my mileage, of course, but I don’t mind a player who is comfortable in the role of villain, even if the villain gets the best of the team you love once or twice.

This fall, Chris Paul announced that he would spend his final season with the Los Angeles Clippers. So far, his second tenure with the team has been a disappointment, even if it was never supposed to be like the first. From 2011 to 2017, Paul helmed a Clippers team best known as Lob City, one of the most thrilling basketball teams in my lifetime. It was a squad that played at a breakneck pace, with the ball thrust into orbit by Paul, and hanging suspended in the arena for a moment, only for one of his hyper-athletic teammates (most likely from the duo of élite rim runners DeAndre Jordan and Blake Griffin) to snatch it out of the air and ram it through the rim. Lob City revived Clippers basketball, which had historically been an afterthought compared to the team they shared a city and arena with, the Los Angeles Lakers. The Lob City-era Clippers were not without controversy (last year, I wrote about the show “Clipped,” which narrativizes the fallout from the racism of the then owner Donald Sterling), but on the court, the Clippers were, for a time, the greatest show in California. Still, despite their dominance, they were never good enough to win a championship. This, too, will be a part of Paul’s legacy: throughout his career, he always made teams better. That was his M.O. He would go to a team that was either not very good, or good but not yet great, and he would instantly improve their odds, often while acting as a mentor to a younger star who needed his veteran wisdom. After his time on the Clippers, he defected to the conference rival Houston Rockets, then did stints in Oklahoma City, Phoenix, San Francisco, and San Antonio. At every stop, he improved the team’s win percentage, sometimes dramatically, and turned two of the teams into bona-fide contenders. But, for all of this success improving underperforming teams, Chris Paul has never actually won a championship. This isn’t uncommon. Countless Hall of Famers from the nineties either retired ringless, or spent the early two-thousands hanging on the coattails of contenders in an attempt to get a ring, because Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls so thoroughly dominated the decade. The Lob City Clippers couldn’t get past the dynastic Golden State Warriors. Neither could the Houston Rockets, though in 2018 they did come close, taking Kevin Durant and Steph Curry to seven games in the Western Conference Finals. Paul got closest to a ring in 2021, in Phoenix, when he won the first two games of the Finals before losing four straight to Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks.

We live in an age of basketball in which rings are, increasingly, treated as the bottom line, despite them being a flawed heuristic for individual dominance. This means that Chris Paul’s legacy, to some, has an asterisk attached, a fact that is compounded by the his ability to make deep playoff runs so often. He just couldn’t drag a team past that point. He’ll make your team good, maybe even great, but never the greatest.

And so, this past off-season, he returned to the Clippers, not necessarily to chase a ring but to return to the franchise that raised him. “If I’m really honest, I wanted to get back and play here by any means necessary,” Paul said. “I didn’t even care what the team looked like. I just wanted to be home, be here with the Clippers.” It was clear that it would be his final season, and everyone assumed that he’d get a proper farewell tour featuring standing ovations and tribute videos—the things that future Hall of Famers sometimes get when they announce their final season. He would be a bench player, logging ten to twelve minutes a game while providing veteran leadership. It would be a feel-good season, and he’d be seen off generously.

That plan came to an end last week, when the Clippers abruptly sent Chris Paul home from a road game in Atlanta and put out a statement explaining that Paul would not be with the team for the rest of the season. The next day, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported on the reason for his departure: “Chris Paul and his leadership style clashed with the Clippers, sources tell ESPN. Paul has been vocal in holding management, coaches and players accountable, which the team felt became disruptive.” Charania also reported that Paul and the Clippers’ head coach, Ty Lue, had not been on speaking terms for “several weeks,” an alarming fact considering that the N.B.A. season itself is less than two months old. (Lue later told reporters this was not true.)

I was interested in this chaos mostly for what it implied about Paul’s leadership style, which increasingly seems to be a relic from the past. As he grew older and his athleticism declined, Paul transitioned into a new role, building a reputation as a thorny, challenging figure, willing to call out ego and lift up younger players. Paul’s unceremonious exit seems to signal a departure from the classic N.B.A. archetype of the veteran locker-room presence—the guy who doesn’t play much but still sits on the bench and offers something important to the team. Udonis Haslem did it in Miami for years, appearing in fewer than twenty games in each of his final seven seasons, while earning his keep as a beloved vet and a culture-setter, before he retired, in 2023. James Johnson bounced around the league for seven seasons, on six different teams, mostly acting as an enforcer, a player who set a tone of toughness.

And, although there still might be a place for this type of player, the Clippers, specifically, were not the right team for it. They are the oldest N.B.A. team since 2012 by average player age (31.1 years, though now, without Paul, that figure has gone down a few years). The Clippers are a team of veterans. Kawhi Leonard, James Harden, Bradley Beal, Brook Lopez: all of these are players who have been in the league for more than a decade, and have been the top dog on a team at some point in their careers. This dynamic was doomed to fail. Paul, dropped into a group of players already on his level, doesn’t have anything to tell them that they don’t already know. On nearly every other team that he’s played for in the last five years, there were young players to take under his wing and guide. In Oklahoma City, he had Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, an up-and-coming star, to mentor; in Phoenix, there was the ascendant Devin Booker; in San Antonio, Victor Wembanyama and Rookie of the Year Stephon Castle. In Los Angeles, these are mostly grown men who, tenure-wise, are far closer to his standing than not. They’re not trying to hear Chris Paul dispense unsolicited wisdom, especially as the Clippers’ season seems to go farther and farther off the rails.

Paul’s departure does come in the middle of a disastrous start for the Clippers. Despite having one of the ten best championship odds at the start of the season, the Clippers are stuck at the bottom of the Western Conference, bedfellows with tanking teams like New Orleans and Utah. At this rate, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t just keep Paul, even if his leadership style was not well received in the locker room, letting him receive the farewells and tributes, and allowing him to end his career on a high note.

The news of Paul’s departure from Los Angeles (and potential early retirement) brought to mind a revealing video of Chris Paul from his time on the San Antonio Spurs. He had just passed Jason Kidd for second all-time in assists, and the team had gifted him a custom-made basketball and plaque, showing Paul at various stages of his career. There he was in a New Orleans Hornets jersey, baggy and oversized, during his rookie season; calling a play in Oklahoma City; throwing a no-look pass in Los Angeles. At the center of the plaque, there was a long list of every teammate Paul had thrown an assist to during his career. Paul got emotional after seeing the list, and gave a short speech that was alarmingly self-aware. “I know I’m hard to deal with a lot of times,” he began, his voice starting to break before he tears up. “I know I’m a lot to deal with on the court, but I just love to hoop. And I hope y’all get this opportunity to play as long as I have.”

I hope Chris Paul ends up somewhere else to close out the season. I don’t know if I believe in sports as a fertile ground for discourse about the what one does or doesn’t “deserve,” but I believe that Chris Paul should be able to end his career on his own terms. Whether that happens or not, I’ll always remember the Timberwolves at the mercy of his expansive court vision, and his commitment to winning by any means necessary. But I’ll also remember that movingly sincere moment in the San Antonio locker room, which encapsulates Paul as a true point guard. He wants something for his teammates, something that they themselves might not yet know they want. But, if they keep their eyes up, and hands out, the ball will find them, eventually. ♦