https://youtu.be/cTmUMokCt9w
I’m sure a lot of people (myself included) were doubtful that the Suns sans Chris Paul would be able to take any games off the Clippers. Their best bet was to try to hold on and keep everybody healthy while waiting for Paul to emerge unscathed from the “health and safety protocols” which currently confine him to a hermetically sealed orb housed in a disused nuclear bunker half a mile underneath the desert sands outside Phoenix. But the Suns defied all the expectations of haters like myself, and won the first two games of the series. And a huge part of this game two victory was Cameron Payne scoring a career high in points.
It’s clear to anybody with a brain what’s going on here: Chris Paul used his knowledge of occult magick to temporarily transfer his elite point guard powers into a different soul-vessel, namely, Cameron Payne. That’s why Payne’s statline was so sick this game. There was a candlelit ritual where arcane Latin verses were chanted, and then Paul and Payne held hands, and then there was a transferal of powers which spat in the face of God himself, but was absolutely necessary from a basketball perspective. If you put CP3 on a court now, he would literally be a useless shell of himself, because the power-transferal was unidirectional, meaning that Payne retained his own powers while absorbing Paul’s powers.
You might think this is some crackpot theory that has no basis in reality, but you’d be wrong. I have personally conducted rituals such as the one described above. It’s just that I don’t have access to any really good basketball players, so when I steal the powers from some random dude I met at the park, it doesn’t actually make me very much better at basketball. Sometimes it makes me worse, if I pick a guy who has a really gross jumpshot (which is most park players).
I concede that there is another possibility here. Payne might have STOLEN Paul’s powers without permission by sneaking into Paul’s bedroom while he slept and muttering the proper incantations while carving the proper symbols into his bare chest with a rusty dagger. That would be a bold move on Payne’s part, but if he plans to give the powers back at some point, then I don’t see what the big deal is, honestly. There’s no law against stealing another person’s basketball skills through occult means, Space Jam style, but there might be a negative effect on the Suns’ team chemistry if Payne is strutting around with his new-found playmaking and scoring abilities while Paul literally stumbles around like a demented old man.
I have to say, if Payne stole Paul’s basketball abilities and incorporated them into his own soul by way of an hours-long magic ritual, I would like to see more midrange attempts from him. He might be trying to disguise the true nature of his newfound powers by avoiding the midrange, but if he’s really serious about the Suns winning this series, he has to use Paul’s abilities to their fullest extent. That means more midrange jumpers, more playmaking wizardry, more flopping, and more snitching on opposing players who have their jerseys untucked.