celtics543 wrote:Sorry if I mistyped but I'm a big Nash fan, I rank him above CP3 all time. I was saying that Nash played point in the same basic era and walked away with 2 MVP' awards. Most people here have CP3 above Nash, which begs the question of how come Nash has two MVP awards and Chris Paul was only a real contender for the award once or twice? You can argue that CP3's competition was greater but that leads me to believe even more that he cant' be top 20 all time. If you say that Kobe, Wade, Dwight, Durant, Russ, Harden, Steph, Kawhi, and Lebron all overlapped with him and kept him from winning the MVP award then those guys have to be ranked higher or on the same tier all time as Chris Paul.
Nash above CP3 is a very defensible position. He's a contender for offensive GOAT - IMO, the second best high-profile shooter ever (after Curry), the second best passer ever (after Magic) and forged truly elite offences year after year. He had some strong longevity too - he was an all star guy minimum for like a decade, and peaked at MVP level impact. I think CP3 was a better player on account of being a much better defender, but Nash's better health + being an offensive
savant make it a fairly good all time comparison.
I do think that simply looking at MVPs is somewhat reductionist though. MVPs are often
heavily narrative driven, and it's why the most controversial recent MVPs in retrospect are Iverson (middling offence on an elite defensive team), Rose (middling offence on an elite defensive team), Westbrook (mind-blowing box score stats and strong impact on a mediocre offensive, but strong defensive team) and... Nash himself.
Nash won 2005 because of a massive turnaround on the Suns, and whilst I do think he's an adequate MVP winner, let's look at the names you proposed.
Kobe - didn't make the playoffs
Shaq - still amazing, although past his prime, and he was extremely close to actually winning
KG - didn't make the playoffs
Dirk - surprised he didn't gain more traction, to be honest. His year fits the superficial MVP criteria very well, and there's narrative behind it too
AI - won 43 games in a lousy eastern conference
Duncan - missed a heap of games
Wade - played alongside Shaq (and I don't think he was an MVP level guy until 2006 anyway)
LeBron - 2nd year, missed the playoffs
So it's not a bad group of guys, but there are definitely cases you can make for some of these guys being as good as, if not better than Nash, but not having the narrative to go with it.
2006, Nash was fantastic again, and it was an incredible year for top end talent in the league, but he won because they still won 54 games despite losing Stoudemire (who was a good player, but seemed even better than he was because Nash fed him so many easy baskets).
CP3's two highest MVP voting years were 2008 and 2012.
In 2008, he came 2nd to Kobe, but I'd actually put KG above him that year too (and I'd put KG 1st, in fact). Kobe was definitely winning it that season - in a close competition, the fact that Kobe hadn't won MVP yet soured the minds of MVP voters, and they wanted him to "finally get that MVP." Again, Kobe was a fine winner, but he also had a better narrative than Paul.
In 2012, he came 3rd to LeBron (who had a true tour-de-force with Miami that year; one of the ATG seasons ever) and Durant (an up and coming superstar on an incredibly exciting team that only seemed to get better and better). CP3 got credit that year for sparking the Clippers turnaround, but there's no way he was beating LeBron.
These 2 regular seasons aren't even standout seasons for him - many consider 2009 his regular season peak, and I consider his overall skill/athleticism/play etc peak in 2015. But he got more votes because of the narrative. FWIW, 2008, 2009 and 2011-2018 CP3 were all top 5-ish seasons - perhaps not clearly the best in any of them, especially given health, but the MVP votes sway more with the narrative surrounding CP3. In 2015, I actually had him second behind Curry in the regular season - he was downright phenomenal that year. But he finished 6th, because it's the same old CP3 again, with no narrative surrounding him aside from the playoff narrative, whereas we had Harden/Westbrook/Davis with upcoming superstar stories and some insane box score stats, and LeBron being LeBron, and returning to Cleveland. More exciting stuff than CP3 just being good ol' clockwork CP3.
MVP votes are kind of silly to gauge a player's worth anyway - I mean, Wade hardly got any MVP votes throughout his career, because he either played alongside Shaq/LeBron, or his team sucked. But he was definitely a strong MVP calibre player for a bunch of years. If 2009 Wade played with even an
average team, 2009 Wade wins MVP in a whole heap of years in NBA history.
I'll give you that CP3's team's were awful in New Orleans after 2008 but those Clippers teams were great. He was with the Clippers for six years and they lost in the first round 3 times as the higher seed each time. It's not like he was losing to the Warriors each time or running into buzz saws, none of the teams they lost to went on to make the finals.
To be fair, in
all 3 of those series, Blake was injured (2013, 2016 and 2017). The Clippers were a higher seed in 2013 and 2017, but they actually won the same amount of games as the Grizzlies (56) and the Jazz (51) in those two seasons. In 2016, CP3 and Blake got injured in the same game. The loss to the Rockets in 2015 negatively defies expectations way more than any of those seasons, IMO.
Those teams may not have been "buzz saws" but they were all very good teams, and the western conference has been a bloodbath.
The average opponent had a +4.7 Net Rating, and literally
all of his opponents won at least 51 games across his Clippers career, aside from the Blazers when CP3 and Blake both got injured in game 4. And even then, CP3 still had a positive net rating of +3.1 in those series, even though he only won 3 of the 9 series that he had played in that span, and even though Blake was injured half of the time.
If we take 2014 and 2015 (the two seasons in which Blake/CP3 had the best health during the playoffs), CP3 had a net rating of +5.5 against some incredibly tough opposition.
He was +9.8 in the series vs the Thunder and +4.4 vs Houston. So, even in those two losses, CP3's lineups were consistently a clear positive. He was +6.1 in the series vs the Warriors and +2.0 vs the Spurs.
That's not an
entirely holistic view, but those 4 teams were +4.9 (Warriors), +6.6 (Thunder), +6.5 (San Antonio) and +3.6 (Houston). That's an average opponent of +5.5, which equates to an (obviously approximate) net rating of +11 once you factor in CP3 being +5.5 on the court himself.
That's actually championship level of team play with CP3 on the court in the two seasons both he and Blake were healthy. And with CP3 off, they were -0.8 vs GSW, -39.7 vs OKC (yes...), -14.9 vs the Spurs and +0.8 vs Houston. And even in 2017 vs Utah, they were a positive with CP3 (+0.4) and a negative without him (-6.9). 2008 Spurs, +1.9 with him on, -4.6 with him off.
I repeat - the Houston series is kind of an interesting aberration (and these do happen in NBA history) where the Clippers won the net battle rating, and lost the overall rating. But there are
plenty of examples of CP3's teams having a positive net rating on the court, and being
absolutely elite when he actually had a healthy roster, and the battle is lost when he goes to the bench.
What more could CP3 have possibly done to have, say, beaten OKC in 2014, when his team was +9.8 with him on, and -39.7 with him off? The entire ruckus about his game 5 turnovers doesn't happen if CP3 didn't play so damn good the rest of the series to begin with.
Do the 2016 Clippers (which started CP3, DeAndre, Redick, heck, even old man Paul Pierce for 38 games and Jeff Green/Lance Stephenson for 10 games each) look like an elite team? Nobody would call that team "stacked" without Blake, and yet, that was the reality for 3 of the 6 seasons that CP3 played in LA in the playoffs. In 2012, CP3 played like trash vs the Spurs (injury or not, it's true).
But in the mere two seasons that CP3 and Blake were both actually healthy in the playoffs and at the peak of their powers, the Clippers
did play some amazing ball in the playoffs when CP3 was on the court. And even in the worst of those series (Houston 2015), the difference between the two teams was the bench catching fire at the right time - the Rockets were actually -4.7 with Harden on the court in that series and +4.4 with him off. And that (along with injuries) is the story behind the Clippers in the playoffs those 6 years.
Is it truly fair to impugn a superstar because the lineups with him played far better than the lineups without him? Is it actually fair to say, "his team was stacked, and yet he failed" when he only really had that "stacked" lineup of CP3/Blake/Redick/Jordan for two seasons, and they played great those two playoffs?
So, apologies for the long, number-driven exposition here, but in summation -
a) there were really only two seasons that CP3 and Blake were both healthy in the playoffs together
b) the Clippers, with CP3 on the court, played out of their freaking minds those two seasons
c) the bench absolutely did not
d) once again, it comes back to injuries - the 6 year window looks far more disappointing than it is once you consider health, and that a good part of it isn't just CP3's health, but also Blake's health, which is out of CP3's control
c) the western conference is a bloodbath
