After a resurgent season, Chris Paul is once again considered one of the premiere NBA players.
The Oklahoma City Thunder point guard was ranked in the second tier of players by The Athletic, which was a list of 10 players the outlet would rank somewhere between No. 7 and 16 in the league.
Seth Partnow, the primary author of these rankings, wrote:
“The lion in winter. Back in charge of his own team after a two year detour in Houston, CP3 demonstrated that reports of his demise as an All-Star-level player have been greatly exaggerated.”
This second tier has three sections to break it up a little further. Paul was in the 2C range along with Jayson Tatum, Paul George and Rudy Gobert, marking him as one of the 13 to 16 best players in the league.
One of the key parts of Paul’s game that allows him to continue to excel is his turnover margin on both ends of the floor.
His rating when combining suppressing turnovers when he’s on offense and forcing turnovers when he’s on defense was by far the best in the league from 2017-20, the three years that The Athletic took into account when formulating these five tiers.
That ties into Paul’s decision-making:
“Paul continues to defy the odds, and really logic, by aging so gracefully. The reasons he has been able to do so are related both to physical skill — Paul has shot an absurd 54.3 percent on long twos over the last three seasons — but more importantly being perhaps the best decision-maker in the game.”
Paul is the fifth Oklahoma City player to be named by The Athletic to one of the tiers ranking the top 125 players in the NBA.
Guard Dennis Schroder and Steven Adams were in tier 5, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Danilo Gallinari were in tier 4.
Joining Paul and the rest of 2C in the second tier were Damian Lillard, Jimmy Butler and Joel Embiid in 2B and Anthony Davis, Luka Doncic and Nikola Jokic in 2A.
The top 6 players in The Athletic’s rankings will be revealed Friday.
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