It's been four seasons since Chris Paul finished ahead of any other point guard in MVP voting, but even before his spectacular 20-point, 20-assist, 0-turnover game on Saturday, it was a legitimate question to ask if CP3 -- in his 12th season -- was playing better than any other PG in the NBA.
While Russell Westbrook, James Harden and Stephen Curry are having remarkable seasons, is Paul actually the best of the group?
And at age 31, is he beating Father Time better than any other point guard ever has?
Paul leads all players by a significant margin in ESPN's real plus-minus (RPM), and he's doing that while averaging 9.4 assists and fewer than 18 points per game -- not quite eye-popping numbers like Westbrook or Harden.
However, there's a 2.12-point gap in RPM between Paul (9.51) and Kevin Durant (7.39), who's No. 2. Paul is fourth in offensive RPM (behind Harden, Westbrook and Curry) and fifth in defensive RPM (behind Andrew Bogut, Paul Millsap, Draymond Green and Rudy Gobert). He's the only guard in the top 40 of DRPM.
Paul is routinely among the league leaders in RPM, which measures how many points better or worse a player is than league average per 100 possessions. He finished third last season, one spot ahead of Curry, and has been a fixture in the top 10 for seven years in a row. He's the type of two-way player that RPM is designed to reward, as his on-the-floor impact goes well beyond the box score.
Beyond eye-test observations of his brilliance, just why has Paul been so dominant beyond his box score numbers?
Defensive impact
Let's start with defense. An eight-time All-Defense selection, Paul's reputation precedes him. He's been named first-team All-Defense in each of the past five seasons, while no other player has made more than two straight appearances on the first team. Through 23 games, he's been as good as ever.
Paul is leading the league in steals per game, which would be his seventh time doing so. Considering no other player has ever led the NBA in SPG more than three times, it's an incredible testament to his ball-hawking skills. It's fairly common for a guard to average 2.5 swipes per game, as Paul is doing this season. Entering this season there have been 73 instances of a guard doing it, most recently Paul in 2011-12. However, what's less common is for a player to do it this late in a career. In fact, since steals became official in 1973-74, the only guard over the age of 30 to do it was Jerry West in 1973-74.
Of course, there's far more to defense than steals. With Paul off the floor this season, the Clippers' defense has been 8.0 points worse per 100 possessions than with him on it. When Paul plays, teams turn it over against the Clippers 13.5 percent of the time (around league average). With him off the floor, that number dips to 11.7 percent, which would tie the Charlotte Hornets for the worst among all teams in the NBA.
Also consider how opposing point guards have performed against the Clippers. With Paul on the floor, they've collectively averaged 5.9 assists and 3.3 turnovers per 36 minutes while shooting 41.5 percent from the floor. Their collective assist-to-turnover ratio of 1.79 would rank 22nd among the group of 24 players with at least 15 starts at PG this season. With Paul off the floor, those starters have collectively averaged 6.3 assists and 2.6 turnovers per 36 minutes for an assist-turnover ratio that would rank right in the middle of the pack. (We do have to add that L.A.'s most-used lineup without CP3 features Raymond Felton, Jamal Crawford and Austin Rivers, all of whom are negative defenders).
Another way of gauging Paul's defensive impact is to compare it to the offensive impact of others. His defense has a larger impact on a per-possession basis than the offense of Kyrie Irving (2.80) and John Wall (2.86), according to RPM. If Paul were average on offense, his defense alone would place him seventh overall in RPM among point guards.
Look at the defensive RPM leaderboard and you'll see pretty much nothing but bigs and Chris Paul. You literally have to click on to the fourth page of DRPM on ESPN.com to find the next point guard (Marcus Smart, at 0.49). RPM creator Jeremias Engelmann said there's a high probability at least one of the league's 85 PGs will start to close the gap in DRPM by the end of the season. However, there are fairly sustainable factors helping Paul's good rating, including his steal rate of 39.1 (second in the league) and good defensive rebounding rate for a PG (15.5). Paul's defensive RPM is the second-best of his career, trailing only 2008-09 when he led the NBA in overall RPM.
Offensive impact
Of course, Paul isn't just average on the offensive end. He's brilliant, even if it's not as obvious as going for 30 points or 15 assists on a nightly basis. He's scoring 17.8 PPG, outside the top 10 among point guards. And though he's fourth in the NBA in assists, his 9.4 per game would be the fourth-lowest average of his career. So how is he fourth in offensive RPM?
Though the Clippers' bench unit got off to a strong start this season, it's somewhat come back down to earth. The result? Once again, whenever Paul is out of the game, the offense suffers. With Paul on the floor, the offense averages 113.8 points per 100 possessions, which would be historically great and rank third in the NBA behind only the Warriors and Raptors, both of which are performing at a level that's better than any offense over the past 30 years. With him off the floor, the offensive efficiency plummets to 103.0 points per 100 possessions, which would rank in the bottom half of the league.
Since Paul's minutes mostly overlap with the other Clippers starters -- coach Doc Rivers doesn't stagger minutes much -- there are similar on/off splits with Blake Griffin, DeAndre Jordan and J.J. Redick. You can also play that same game with Westbrook and Harden and get similar results. Slicing and dicing lineup data to look at the Clippers with Paul but without Griffin and the others yields very small sample sizes. But make no mistake, if the Clippers' offense were an "American Idol" singer, it hums to the tune of Carrie Underwood when Paul is on the floor and William Hung when he's on the pine.
SportVU shooting data offers additional insight into the impact that Paul has on the offense. Heading into Saturday's game, the Clippers were shooting 54 percent on passes from Paul, including 45 percent from 3-point range. On all other shots, his teammates were shooting 43 percent overall and 34 percent from 3. In particular, each of his other three primary scorers are all significantly more effective when shooting off passes from CP3.
The age factor
For Paul to be dominating both sides of the ball as he is would be impressive no matter his age, but he's doing this in his 12th season. Since RPM relies on play-by-play data, it goes back only to 2000-01. Within that time frame, the only players 31 or older who come close to matching Paul's production are LeBron James last season, when he led the league in RPM at plus-9.79, and John Stockton in 2000-01, when he posted an RPM of plus-9.54. From an RPM standpoint, Paul's season is shaping up similarly to Stockton's, in which he incredibly maintained an offensive RPM better than 6.0 and a defensive RPM better than 3.0, just as Paul is currently doing -- except Stockton did it at age 38.
If we want to look even further back using player efficiency rating (PER), history shines even brighter upon what Paul has managed to accomplish thus far. His PER of 28.1, which would be his best since the 2008-09 season when he was 23 years old, would be the best ever by a point guard in his 12th season or later, surpassing Magic Johnson's 25.1 in 1990-91. Through the lens of PER, no guard in NBA history has posted a better PER than Paul in his 12th season or later (Michael Jordan's 27.8 in 1996-97 is the closest).
With the combination of challenging the offensive greatness of players like Curry, Westbrook and Harden and defending way better than any of them, Paul is making a good case to be the best PG in the league a quarter of the way into the season. And pulling that off at age 31 is a very impressive sign of his longevity and consistency.