All The Point God's Men
Breaking down Chris Paul's legendary history of assists
Chris Paul now has more assists than all but one human in the history of American professional basketball. He’s almost certainly not gonna pass John Stockton before he retires, so now is as good a time as any to take stock of the Point God’s illustrious history of diming dudes up.
So, I’ve broken things down in three ways: By teammate, by team, and by opponent.
There is some really nice symmetry here. Griffin and West were not similar players in terms of their athletic gifts or even the way CP3 connected with them (except insofar as they both ran a whole lot of pick and rolls), but I do think it’s fitting that it was the non-center frontcourt option in both Los Angeles and New Orleans that was on the receiving end of his most assists with those teams.
You also have Redick and Stojakovic, who filled similar roles with the Clippers and Hornets, respectively. And the same goes for Jordan and Chandler. There was no real secondary frontcourt option for Paul in Phoenix (Mikal Bridges, Cam Johnson, and Jae Crowder were all interchangeable wings), so it makes sense that the top two targets there were Ayton and Booker.
Among those outside the top 10, there were another 16 that were on the receiving end of at least 100 of Paul's assists. Again, they filled similar roles with his various organizations: Bridges (292), Jamal Crawford (259), Matt Barnes (226), Caron Butler (217), Eric Gordon (183; and these guys were once traded for each other), Trevor Ariza (181), Emeka Okafor (175 as Chandler’s successor in New Orleans), Johnson (160), Morris Peterson (157; and I totally forgot that they even played together), Clint Capela (148; remember that connection?), Crowder (146), Willie Green (143), Marco Belinelli (140), Desmond Mason (140), Luc Mbah a Moute (136), and Devin Brown (125).
Running through the full list of names is quite a trip down memory lane. P.J. Brown (98), Gerald Green (88; I remember talking to him back in the day about the difference between catching passes from Chris Paul and from James Harden), Randy Foye (83), Marc Jackson (81; the center, not the announcer), Julian Wright (73), Hilton Armstrong (68), Darius Songaila (58), Speedy Claxton (56), Wesley Johnson (54; and I couldn’t remember whether this was in L.A. or somewhere else), Spencer Hawes (47), Kirk Snyder (44), Sean Marks (37; yes, the longtime Nets GM), Bonzi Wells (29), James Ennis III (24), Terrance Ferguson (22), Melvin Ely (19), Cole Aldrich (17), Bostjan Nochbar (16), Nick Young (14)... and these are only guys who he assisted at least 10 times. There are a whole bunch of players on these lists who have been coaches or executives for a while at this point.
Then you go down into the single digits: Gary Clark! (9) Iman Shumpert! (9) Cedric Simmons! (7) Jackson Vroman! (4) D.J. Mbenga! (4) Marcus Vinicius! (2) Arvydas Macijauskas! (1) I've covered the league for 15 years and I don't even remember either of those last two guys.
Do you remember Chris Paul assisting Nate Robinson?? Because that apparently happened (once). Antawn Jamison (2), too. Michael Carter-Williams (2), Brandon Knight (3), Joe Johnson (8; when????).
And all that is before you get to the legends (or future legends) with whom you don't really associate CP3, but with whom he did play for a season or more: Klay Thompson (91), James Harden (68), Paul Pierce (66), Victor Wembanyama (52 and counting), Steph Curry (51), Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (37), Kevin Durant (17), Carmelo Anthony (15), Draymond Green (11), even Grant Hill (4).
One thing that really surprised me was that CP3 had more assists with the Hornets than he did with the Clippers.
He played with those teams for an equal number of seasons, but I guess I just associate him more with L.A. because his tenure there coincided with my starting to cover the league. He did play 16 more games with the Hornets, and I guess the assist total is at least partially a reflection of that.
He’s already more than halfway to his Warriors assist total, in just 24 games with the Spurs. He’s only played around 45% as many minutes with San Antonio as he did with Golden State; but he has much more playmaking responsibility now than he did last year because he’s no longer on a team with Curry and Green.
It’s a similar thing with Phoenix and Houston. He only played one more season with the Suns than he did with the Rockets, but he and James Harden were essentially co-point guards under Mike D’Antoni, while he was much more responsible for running the show when he was in Phoenix.
And during his one season with the Thunder (which was actually his third season in OKC, because the Hornets played there after Katrina), he often shared the court with one or both of SGA and Dennis Schroder, but he was the guy with the ball in his hands most often.
Finally, we come to the opponents section. Consider me surprised once again, with the Kings topping the list.
The Lakers are second, and we can cue all the, “the NBA vetoed the trade!” takes that pretend it was the league office doing the rejection and not David Stern, as acting owner of the then-Hornets (and how insane was that???), determining that it was best to prioritize young talent and draft picks in exchange for CP3 — which turned out to be the right decision, by the way.
Lamar Odom, Kevin Martin, Luis Scola, and Goran Dragic was not as good a deal as the one they got, which netted Eric Gordon through his early prime and what ended up being a top-10 draft pick.
Unsurprisingly, each of the top 15 teams are from the Western Conference. He’s spent his entire career in the West, so that makes sense.
Detroit randomly being first among Eastern Conference teams is a nice bit of trivia, I guess. With the East opponents, the number of games he played or missed against them due to injuries is probably the single-biggest factor. If you combine Brooklyn and New Jersey, the Nets would jump up ahead of the Clippers with 340 assists. Combining Seattle and Oklahoma City (sorry) would move that franchise into third, behind only the aforementioned Kings and Lakers.
I also think it’s interesting that all in all, 2,789 of his assists came against teams that he played for at one point or another. That’s more than 23% of his total. I suppose that’ll happen when you play for so many different teams.