What would CP3 have to do to overtake Curry on your all time list?

[mdonnelly1989]

What would CP3 have to do to overtake Curry on your all time list?

[Bobbcats]

Either start his career on a much better team or not get the knee injury. I'm afraid that ship has sailed unless he wins titles til the end of his contract.

[falcolombardi]

if you value winning rings as "the man" or individual accolades like mvp strongly, then there is honestly not much to do unless suns become a surprise dinasty and chris paul still remains a big part of it

from a purely "value added" point of view i think he needs a significant longevity advantage

i actually have his prime only a bit below curry prime

[ShotCreator]

Im curious as to when Curry overtook him in the first place

[HeartBreakKid]

hes already ahead

[Statlanta]

He can't do anything. The difference literally is being healthy at the right time

[An Unbiased Fan]

Not possible. CP3 will never be on Curry's tier

[SickMother]

I've got Magic alone in the top PG tier, then Curry / Big O / West / Paul together in the next tier.

I value peak (with extra credit for ringzzz) over longevity, thus my preference for Curry over Paul.

Even with all the injuries, Paul still has a pretty massive longevity edge over Curry, is a superior "true PG" or whatever & also has better defensive chops. Those who prefer CP3 for those reasons have a perfectly legitimate case.

Paul would need at least two rings for me to consider him above Curry (or Big O / West), but the margins are so thin I don't really believe there is a "right" answer.

[Cavsfansince84]

Its hard to say what CP3 would need to do without taking into account what Curry is doing since he is both active and younger than CP3. This would be easier to answer if Steph were already retired. As it is Steph is still playing at a reasonably high level and adding to his own legacy.

[No-more-rings]

Paul is 3-4 years older, and Curry has the better peak and prime so probably not likely at all.

[No-more-rings]

It’s really funny how rings do or don’t matter depending on whether a person likes or dislikes a player.

[LukaTheGOAT]

Already is ahead. Apologies to CP3 that it took me so long to see the light.

[coastalmarker99]

Curry destroys CP3 in terms of major accolades and being an elite playoff performer.


Hell had Curry retired at the end of 2019 most people would still rank Curry over CP3.


That's how legendary Curry's 2015 to 2019 run was.

[coastalmarker99]

CP3 was supposed to lead the Clippers to the championship like Curry did with GSW.


Lob City was supposed to be the team to beat, not GSW.

CP3 was also supposed to win MVPs like Curry.

CP3 was supposed to be the ideal PG that would set the example for every guard coming in after him, instead that became Curry.

there’s just no way CP3 is above Curry.


Also IMO CP3 played with just as many good players as Curry did before KD.


Those Clipper teams were really stacked.


The talent wasn’t an issue and according to former lob city members, it was all about egos and pettiness.

CP3 being a leader it was his responsibility to get his team to rise past it.


That’s another measure of greatness that CP3 never found a way to get past.

[An Unbiased Fan]

Already is ahead. Apologies to CP3 that it took me so long to see the light.

How is CP3 ahead? I'm seriously curious. Curry has his beat in every way

[GSP]

Already is ahead. Apologies to CP3 that it took me so long to see the light.

How is CP3 ahead? I'm seriously curious. Curry has his beat in every way

What do you mean by every way? Are you implying Steph is a better defender or passer?

[An Unbiased Fan]

Already is ahead. Apologies to CP3 that it took me so long to see the light.

How is CP3 ahead? I'm seriously curious. Curry has his beat in every way

What do you mean by every way? Are you implying Steph is a better defender or passer?

I meant in scope of their careers.

[Doctor MJ]

What would CP3 have to do to overtake Curry on your all time list?

A timely question.

I first want to point folks attention to where these guys stack up by MVP Shares:

Curry 2.655
Paul 1.803

Now, our own POY Shares:

Curry 3.277
Paul 2.557

Speaking generally here, I'd really recommend folks go through year-by-year and decide for themselves whether they agree with how the players stack up here. For anyone who finds they don't, that might be the best place for conversation. I'm thinking of people who might have Curry lower and Paul higher here, and to be clear, I'm actually on the other side of things - I have Curry higher and Paul lower than these metrics do.

But let's just take these metrics as a starting point. If you are fine seeing things about along these lines, then the question then becomes how much ground Paul can make up based on years where he's not a Top 5 player. Each person is going to have their own weighting of longevity, and so I'll say right from the jump that I could see people already seeing Paul as having the better overall career.

However,

I have seen a serious tendency these past couple years to really, really downgrade how impressive Curry (and other Warriors) were over their half decade run without consciously doing it, and I think folks need to remember:

If you weren't around for the Jordan Bulls, then Curry was the most valuable player on the greatest 5 year team run you've ever seen in addition to having the best regular season you've ever seen ('15-16) and being the most valuable player on the best team in history ('16-17).

These are things I don't think folks should be quick to brush aside.

As for me, realistically what it's going to take for Paul to surpass Curry, is for events to cause a re-evaluation of one or both of these players that significantly re-casts how I see what has already happened. This is something I specifically look to allow for in my own going process and so I absolutely do not want to say it's impossible...but to this point we haven't seen Paul prove himself capable of being the focal point point of such extreme outlier performances, and it will be unlikely that I'll have a big enough upward-adjustment of Paul's performance to surpass Curry unless I see something like it.

[Texas Chuck]

Unlike Doc I don't give Curry all the credit for the most talented team in the league winning 3 titles. Especially once Durant was added to the core. Warriors were a great team and deserve recognition for it. And Curry was a huge part of it, but far from all of it. Draymond was a top 10 player during that run. Klay a top 25 player. KD a top 5 player. And good role players behind the star power.

It's amusing to me how we dismiss all the winning Lebron did because "superteams" but ignore how much more talented those Warriors teams were than any Lebron team ever including the first couple years in Miami before Wade started his decline.

But yeah peak guys are going to take Curry. Longevity guys are likely going to take Paul. Mixed guys probably find this a very tough discussion and that's where I am.

[Doctor MJ]

Even with all the injuries, Paul still has a pretty massive longevity edge over Curry

I know you're not making an argument for Paul here (or an argument for Curry, you're being meta, like many of us are here and I appreciate that), but I think it's worth considering just what that longevity entails.

Prior to this year, Paul had made 10 All-NBA teams.

Prior to this year, I had Curry having a Top 5 season 8 times. (Feel free to ask me questions anyone, this isn't something I'm "rounding up" on, if you go back in the POY vote in '12-13, you're going to see that I was not the only one who ranked him as a Top 5 player then even as the All-Star game folks managed to not see him as an all-star favoring David Lee instead, which seemed precisely as absurd to us back then as it did to everyone soon after.)

Of course everyone will (and should) adjust based on their own assessment of what each guy deserved, but I hope it's clear to people why I don't see Paul as really having a massive longevity edge over Curry in a comparison of the "star years" that would typically make up a star's longevity. Yes, Paul's been in this club for considerably longer ('07-08 vs '12-13, a 5 year difference), but Paul hasn't been lighting the world on fire on this scale with the consistency of an ideal career arc. '07-08 after remains his peak as an MVP candidate, and he had a 4 year gap in his All-NBA accolades.

I think that when a player has a great year later in his career after a gap, one way people tend to conceptualize what he was and what he did is by essentially applying a smoothing filter where any such gaps are dismissed, and I think it's important to be careful with this. It's not that it doesn't say something meaningful - it speaks to a player's capacity for longevity certainly - but when you use it to make an argument for actual longevity in a player comparison against a player with a superior prime, you essentially give this player credit for things he didn't actually do.

(And again, if you personally think Paul's peak/prime/whatever was better than Curry's, you're entitled to your assessment, but this is a different debate than the longevity point.)