This week on NBA Tuesday, we sadly close the books on a professional basketball player we think has been the most underrated this century: Chris Paul. He played what turned out to be his final game on December 1, 2025, before eventually being traded and subsequently retiring officially on February 13, 2026. We have posted a lot of data and information on Paul over the years, but now, with the final numbers in—barring a late contract with a contending team in need this spring—we want to finalize our stance.

Let’s start here: he is the seventh-best player in the history of the league in terms of Win Shares per 48 Minutes Played, which is the best quantitative marker of value added by an individual for a career. Furthermore, he is the highest-rated point guard in this category, as the players rated above him include five centers and one shooting guard. Thus, we can argue firmly that he would be our top-line choice to start at point guard for an all-time team, although Magic Johnson is just barely below him in the rankings.

Paul was a 12-time All Star, a nine-time member of the All-Defensive team, a six-time steals leader, and a five-time assists king. He won the 2013 ASG MVP vote, in addition to the 2005-2006 ROTY vote. Additionally, we picked him as our league MVP three times (2008, 2011, 2015) even though he never won that award, sadly. Also, he never won an NBA title, despite playing on some pretty amazing teams that fell short in the postseason for a variety of reasons. In the “ring culture” world of clueless fans … yeah.

CP3 also finished second all time in assists and second all time in steals. At age 40, his game had been in decline since the NBA Finals debacle of 2022, when his Phoenix Suns blew a 2-0 lead and lost in six games to the Milwaukee Bucks. It’s hard to pin that one on Paul, as he averaged 21.8 points and 8.2 assists per game in that matchup, while shooting 55 percent from the floor overall and a crazy-good 52.2 percent from three-point range. Yet the Suns lost the last three games by a combined 17 points, roughly.

It’s surprising the league never decided to “anoint” CP3 in ways it did for lesser players who may have had more “charisma”—or whatever it was someone like Kobe Bryant allegedly possessed. Paul joined the league as a member of the 2005-2006 New Orleans Hornets, who were displaced by Hurricane Katrina and had to play in Oklahoma City for awhile before the Seattle SuperSonics moved there to become the Thunder. Despite winning the ROTY nod, he never seemed to overcome marginalization.

Paul also ended up being a vagabond, playing for seven teams in his 21 NBA seasons: New Orleans (2005-2011); the Los Angeles Clippers (2011-2017, 2025); Houston (2017-2019); Oklahoma City (2019-2020); Phoenix (2020-2023); Golden State (2023-2024); and San Antonio (2024-2025). Teams like Golden State had no idea how to use his skill sets, though, and again, his game was winding down quite a bit in his late-30s seasons. The lack of continuity throughout his career certainly hurt the perception of him.

Also, one of the big flaws in his career, though, is the durability issue. At just six feet and 175 pounds, he took a beating and only played a full 82-game season twice—in 2014-2015 and again in 2024-2025 at age 39. He averaged 67.7 games per season over the first 20 years of his career, and he only played in 16 games this season with the Clippers, who also had no idea how to use him even though CP3 topped the Spurs last season in overall Win Shares. Maybe Paul was a victim of bad coaching; we’re not sure.

Either way, it was a relatively quiet departure from one of the all-time greats. We hope people learn to appreciate him more now.