First Raymond Felton, now Austin Rivers, who the heck needs Chris Paul? Not the Clippers, that’s for sure, not when two role-players of dubious quality can come in and put up the same stats as the supposed “best PG in the league”.
Notice how I put that in quotation marks. It’s because I don’t think he really is the best PG in the league. That’s something that fancy writers like myself do, is use quotation marks in fancy ways like that. That’s okay. I didn’t really expect you to understand.
Back to Austin Rivers. I’m not going to say that he’s better than Chris Paul. Such a proclamation would be hasty. “Austin Rivers is better than Chris Paul”. See how hasty that sounds? Anyone who said something like that would be getting way ahead of themselves. After all, while Rivers has had his share of good games recently, Paul has a whole career’s worth of them.
The thing with NBA players, though, is that the young ones get better and the old ones get worse. Austin Rivers = young. Chris Paul = old. The gap is closing, closing faster than even Father Doc could have anticipated. That’s the truth. I am not being reactionary in any way to a surprising win over the Grizzlies where Rivers scored a bunch of points, did some of those crossovers that his high-school hype-edifice was built out of, and made some okay passes. Not reactionary at all.