Phoenix Suns 2021-22 player previews: Chris Paul starts unfinished business from scratch in Year 17

Entering his age-36 season, Chris Paul is who he is.

Even armed with a new four-year contract under his belt, he’s not going to suddenly change in Year 17. After CP3 came painfully close to the championship trophy he’s been chasing for 16 years now, his title window is creeping shut. He and the Phoenix Suns came up two wins short, and now both parties have unfinished business to attend to.

So how does one come back from that kind of heartache, after spending nearly two decades chasing a ring, getting so close to the mountaintop and falling back down to the bottom of the hill? How do you mentally and physically regroup in a span of two months to try and reach uncharted territory before your prime dwindles away?

“I think the biggest thing is that hunger,” Paul said at Suns Media Day. “That underdog mentality that we had last year, I think we gotta keep it. We gotta keep that same energy going into this year, understanding that we probably have more television games than we had last year, knowing that there’s gonna be teams that’s coming forward so they want us. But we gotta want to beat them worse than they want to beat us.”

CP3 isn’t going to suddenly change his game or his mindset, but each new season comes with the added task of staving off Father Time for another year. A look at his first campaign with the Suns provides some clues as to what to expect in 2021-22.

A LOOK AT CHRIS PAUL SO FAR

Fortunately for the Suns, even at this point in his career, Chris Paul remains one of the most prolific floor generals in the NBA. Last year, the legendary point guard averaged a respectable 16.4 points, 8.9 assists, 4.5 rebounds and 1.4 steals per game. He ranked third in the NBA in assists, led the league in free-throw percentage and put up tidy .499/.395/.934 shooting splits.

Even more impressive, Paul maintained his hyper-efficiency despite creating the majority of both his and the Suns’ offense. According to Cleaning The Glass, Paul was only assisted on 16 percent of his buckets in the regular season, putting him in the 96th percentile for individual scorers at his position. In the playoffs, that number dropped even further to 12 percent, placing him in the 100th percentile.

Anyone who’s watched CP3 operate over the last decade knows he’s a midrange surgeon, but his precision from that area was stunning in Phoenix. A whopping 64 percent of his non-garbage time looks came from that area, per Cleaning The Glass, spiking to 70 percent in the postseason — both of which put him in the 100th percentile. Even so, he shot 53 percent on those looks during the season (94th percentile) and 50 percent in the playoffs (93rd percentile).

Paul’s prowess as an iso scorer shouldn’t be taken for granted, especially at his age. As The Bball Index points out, he placed in the 93rd percentile in total isos per 75 possessions, the 82nd percentile in effective field goal percentage on isos and the 99th percentile in points per possession on isolation plays.

Throw in his elite shooting marks despite rarely being open…

• Catch-and-shoot 3-point percentage: 47 percent (95th percentile)
• Pull-up 3-point percentage: 37.2 percent (77th percentile)
• 3-point openness rating: 4th percentile

…and his playmaking…

Writing about Chris Paul for tomorrow and lmao. This was from last year, at age 35 pic.twitter.com/2Wf22TMuXg

— Gerald Bourguet (@GeraldBourguet) October 17, 2021

…and you’ve got a floor general who’s hardly lost a step, despite what the raw averages might indicate. How he remains so locked in entering Year 17 is a mystery to head coach Monty Williams.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I wish I knew. I think if you tried to define it, you probably would understate it and diminish it. I just think he has something about him that drives him, you know what I mean? I know he wants a championship. Obviously, we all do this for the money, even though people don’t want to admit it. We want to be great. But there’s something else there. To have a guy wake up that early every day to come in and get the tissue work in and all the stuff that he does every single day, it just amazes me. And I can’t define it. I’ve seen it, but I couldn’t tell you what it is. I think these special players, special people have that quality.”

CHRIS PAUL HAS UNFINISHED BUSINESS

Given that Chris Paul is approaching his twilight years and that the Suns’ window for title contention with him onboard is right now, the next few years bear extra weight for both him and the franchise. Phoenix should feel accomplished for what it achieved last year and can take comfort in how much this young group impressed during its first postseason run together.

But for a guy who’s seen plenty of postseason heartbreak and come up short of the ultimate goal so many times, Paul is well aware that nothing is guaranteed in this league, especially as he enters his late 30s.

“I think our expectation is to come in and start the process over again,” he said. “We’ve gotta work, day one. It’s not like you come into the season and they be like, ‘All right, playoffs is set. We gon’ start where we were last year.’ No, there’s a lot of things that we can get better at and that we gotta get better at. And that’s the whole fun part of the season. Getting as far as we did was cool and well, but when we all saw each other, we were basically reminiscing on the process, all the moments that that got us there.”

Paul admitted continuity is on the Suns’ side, especially with a full training camp, as opposed to last year’s condensed ramp-up to the season. He pointed out how beneficial it is to be in the same system this time, unlike the last few years he spent bouncing around from Houston to Oklahoma City and then to Phoenix.

But even with most of the roster intact and many of the new faces representing seamless fits, the Suns’ star point guard won’t let anyone rest on their laurels. In fact, he’s barely rewatched any of the film from that championship series against the Milwaukee Bucks, preferring to focus on the present rather than the past or the future.

“You remember a lot of it or whatnot, but at this point, it’s about focusing on this year,” he said. “If there’s a situation where as a team, we’re like, ‘Oh, we like this, we need to try to do this again,’ but yeah, I think we sort of passed that and realized that in order to get an opportunity again, we gotta start from scratch.”

Starting from scratch in Year 17, after coming that close to finally being king of the hill, would be a daunting task for most players. That’d especially be the case for a now-36-year-old who had surgery on his wrist over the offseason.

But Chris Paul is not most players. The 11-time All-Star said he spent 6-7 full weeks rehabbing that wrist, and even as a guy whose playoff pursuits have been repeatedly derailed by injury woes, it was just the latest hurdle to overcome.

“Taking care of your body is a full-time job, day in and day out,” he said. “You gotta know when to train, you gotta know when to do different things and I’m always just figuring it out, learning as I go too. But nothing new, just continuing to do the work.”

“Continuing to do the work” rings true for one of the game’s all-time greatest grinders, a resourceful talent who has continually overcome his lack of size and burst in his later years with next-level intelligence, fine-tuned skill and sheer willpower. Stopping to reflect on another All-Star and All-NBA season, which came with his first ever Finals appearance, was never on the agenda for a player whose mind will continually shift to the next obstacle until he’s finally won the race. And even this late in his career, when it’d be natural to reflect on a devastating Finals loss that may prove to be his last chance, that doubt and negativity is already in the rearview mirror.

The Suns’ future looks bright between Devin Booker, Deandre Ayton, Mikal Bridges and Cam Johnson. But all that continuity from last year’s feel-good season means squat for a player who’s waging a war against Father Time, heightened expectations, his own body and the rest of the league to finally reach the NBA’s peak.

Chris Paul may not have any new tricks up his sleeve, but when those tricks have so much magic left in them, what better person to lead this team to the next stage of its progression?

“It’s something we’ve gotta continue to grow on,” he said. “It’s not like we’re gonna go into any game with a 10-15 point lead just because we’ve got so much of our team back. We gotta build on what we did last year and we gotta graduate.”