I truly thought that this year would be the Chris Paul show in Oklahoma City. I did not think it would be the Shai Gilgeous-Alexander show. “The Chris Paul Show” has a nicer ring to it, not that it makes a difference at this point.
There’s a concept found all throughout the professional world called “seniority” where older or longer-tenured employees get more money and promotions and stuff even if they’re objectively worse at their job compared to younger or shorter-tenured employees. It might not seem fair to those on the wrong end of the deal, but upon further analysis, it’s actually extremely fair because, uh, you know. Just deal with it, okay? Your time will come, just be patient.
Paul was in a perfect position to invoke seniority and proceed to utterly dominate the ball and only let other people touch it if they promised to shoot it right away in order to give Paul the assist. I was looking forward to it, actually, one last season of good-stats-but-no-real-success play from Paul before he was really too old to do it. Instead, we’ve got SGA playing as the alpha dog and Paul taking a backseat.
Gilgeous-Alexander is averaging well over 20 points per game, and if he keeps it up, you know what’s going to happen. It might be hard to tell if you’re not really paying attention, but one day you just won’t seem him on my channel anymore. And I won’t be too sad about it; his name takes a LONG time to spell out, I probably wasted at least an hour of my life so far just trying to get all those letters in the right order.