Chris Paul
Chris Paul retired on April 10, 2026 without a championship ring, which will be the first sentence of every obituary of his career and the reason he will probably be underrated for the next fifty years. Strip the ring away and what is left is the most decorated résumé a point guard has ever put together without one: twelve All-Star selections, eleven All-NBA teams, nine All-Defensive teams, five assist titles, six steals titles (the most in league history), an MVP-runner-up finish, and career totals of 23,058 points, 12,552 assists, and 2,489 steals. He is the only player to reach 20,000 points and 10,000 assists. For nineteen seasons, from his 2005-06 Rookie of the Year campaign through the game he started at age thirty-nine in San Antonio next to Victor Wembanyama, he was the argument against the idea that championships are the only measure of a point guard. He lost that argument in the court of public opinion. He won it in almost every other way.
Winston-Salem and the 61-point night
He was born May 6, 1985 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His father, Charles Edward Paul, and his older brother Charles “C.J.” Paul Jr. shared the same initials he did, which is where “CP3” originally came from. The family was tight. His grandfather, Nathaniel “Papa” Jones, ran the first Black-owned service station in North Carolina, held court at the pumps, and was the adult Chris spent the most time with growing up.
On November 15, 2002, during Chris’s senior year at West Forsyth High School, Jones was beaten to death in his own driveway by five teenagers in a robbery. He was sixty-one years old. The next night Chris played a high-school game he had already committed to. He scored 61 points, one for each year of his grandfather’s life, and intentionally airballed his last free throw and walked off the court. Twenty years later the book he wrote about his grandfather was titled Sixty One: Life Lessons from Papa, On and Off the Court (Simon & Schuster, 2023).
He was named a McDonald’s All-American and North Carolina Mr. Basketball in 2003. Every program in the country wanted him. He chose Wake Forest because it was fifteen minutes from his mother’s house.
Wake Forest (2003–2005)
He started every game of his freshman season. In his second game at the school, Wake beat a North Carolina team that would win the 2005 national title. Paul finished that year as the ACC Rookie of the Year. In his sophomore season Wake Forest reached the top of the AP poll for the only time in school history and Paul was the consensus first-team All-American at point guard. He declared for the draft in the spring of 2005 with a 3.21 GPA and a degree still twelve credits away. He finished the degree seventeen years later, in December 2022, at Winston-Salem State, because he had promised his grandfather he would. Wake retired his #3 on March 2, 2013, while he was still playing in the league.
The New Orleans Hornets years (2005–2011)
The 2005 draft was Andrew Bogut, Marvin Williams, Deron Williams, and then Paul at No. 4 to the New Orleans Hornets. Bogut and Williams at two and three were reaches in hindsight; Paul won Rookie of the Year comfortably and was gone from that conversation within a season. Hurricane Katrina displaced the franchise during his first training camp and the Hornets played the 2005-06 and most of the 2006-07 seasons in Oklahoma City, which is how a significant slice of OKC’s basketball memory from that era involves Chris Paul in a teal-and-purple Hornets jersey before the Thunder existed. (The franchise that would become the Thunder was then still the Seattle SuperSonics, two years away from relocation.)
His peak in New Orleans was 2007-08. He averaged 21.1 points, 11.6 assists, and a league-leading 2.7 steals per game while shooting 48.8% from the floor. He led the NBA in both assists and steals that year and finished second to Kobe Bryant in the MVP vote. The Hornets won 56 games, the most in franchise history, and lost to San Antonio in the second round in a series that came down to a Game 7 on the road. He led the league in assists again the next season. He also got hurt. A right knee injury in January 2010 ate most of 2009-10 and the New Orleans front office never rebuilt the roster to match him. By the summer of 2011 he had asked for a trade.
The vetoed Lakers trade (December 2011)
On December 8, 2011, the Hornets agreed to send Paul to the Los Angeles Lakers in a three-team deal that would have sent Pau Gasol to Houston and Lamar Odom, Luis Scola, Kevin Martin, Goran Dragić, and a first-round pick to New Orleans. The Hornets at that moment were owned by the NBA itself, in a transitional arrangement while the league searched for a new buyer, which meant that Commissioner David Stern was effectively both general manager and commissioner. Within hours of the trade agreement, he vetoed it.
The memo Stern sent to the Hornets front office, first reported by ESPN’s Marc Stein, said the deal was being killed for “basketball reasons.” Those two words became one of the most repeated phrases in NBA internet history. No commissioner before or since has voided an agreed-on trade between franchises. Eight days later Paul was sent to the Clippers for Eric Gordon, Chris Kaman, Al-Farouq Aminu, and a first-round pick. Gasol stayed in Los Angeles. The Lakers won forty-one games in a nine-year stretch before Paul got there. They won forty-three in the next two combined.
Lob City and the Clippers (2011–2017)
The Clippers hadn’t made the second round of the playoffs since 1976. They had Blake Griffin, who had just won Rookie of the Year, and DeAndre Jordan, who was a shot-blocking project. Paul arrived and the team averaged 56 wins across his six full seasons, made the playoffs every year, and never reached the conference final. Lob City, the nickname coined by Jordan in a postgame interview after a Griffin alley-oop against the Lakers, stuck. Paul made every All-Star team from 2012 through 2016 and was the 2013 All-Star Game MVP.
The one that hurt most was 2015. The Clippers led the Houston Rockets 3–1 in the second round. Paul scored 27 in Game 7 on a hamstring that was visibly compromised. Houston won Game 7 in Los Angeles behind Josh Smith and Corey Brewer putting up the game of their careers off the bench. A year later a broken hand ended Paul’s first-round series against Portland. The Clippers traded him to Houston in the summer of 2017.
Houston and the injury (2017–2019)
The Rockets traded seven players and a first-round pick for him. In his first season Houston won 65 games, the best record in the NBA, and held a 3–2 lead in the Western Conference Finals over the 2017-18 Golden State Warriors. Paul pulled his right hamstring in Game 5. Games 6 and 7 were played without him. The Rockets missed 27 straight three-pointers in Game 7. Kevin Durant, playing for Golden State at the time, scored the game’s final basket. That Warriors team won the championship four games later. See our Kevin Durant biography for the other side of that series.
He and James Harden feuded openly during the 2018-19 season, the team peaked early in the playoffs, and in July 2019 Houston traded Paul to Oklahoma City for Russell Westbrook. Most analysts at the time described it as a salary dump on the Thunder’s part. The Thunder, instead, won fifty games with Paul as their thirty-four-year-old point guard and head coach of the floor, took Houston to a Game 7 in the 2020 playoff bubble, and lost by two. Coach Billy Donovan said afterward that Paul was the best teammate he had ever coached. He was an All-Star again that year.
Phoenix and the Finals (2020–2023)
Phoenix acquired him in November 2020 for Kelly Oubre, Ricky Rubio, Ty Jerome, Jalen Lecque, and a 2022 first-round pick. The Suns had not made the playoffs in ten years. In his first season there they went 51–21, rolled through the Lakers, Nuggets, and Clippers, and went up 2–0 in the Finals on Milwaukee. The Bucks won the next four. Paul was thirty-six years old and playing on the hand he had broken in a January blood-clot recovery and had not been the same shooter since. He scored 26 in the Finals loss in Game 6 anyway.
He reached two milestones that year. On March 21, 2021, he became the sixth player ever to record 10,000 career assists. On October 22, 2021, he became the first player with 20,000 points and 10,000 assists. No one else in league history has been in that club alone for any length of time; it is the most mathematical expression of how strange his career numbers are. The Suns won 64 games the next season, the most in franchise history, and Paul led the league in assists for the fifth and final time. They lost to Dallas in the second round in a series that included a 33-point Game 7 performance from Luka Dončić, which is covered on our Luka Dončić page.
Golden State, San Antonio, and the final Clippers return (2023–2026)
Phoenix traded him to Golden State in June 2023. He came off the bench in his first game for the Warriors, which ended his NBA-record streak of 1,365 consecutive regular-season games started. The Warriors waived him a year later. He signed a one-year deal with San Antonio on July 7, 2024, to play next to Victor Wembanyama, and started all 82 games in his twentieth season, something no player had ever done at that age. On April 1, 2025, in a game at Oklahoma City, he passed Jason Kidd for third all-time in assists and moved within sight of John Stockton’s mark. (He finished 2,800 assists short of Stockton. Stockton’s record is going to last a while.)
He signed with the Clippers on July 21, 2025 for a farewell season. It did not work. After sixteen games, head coach Tyronn Lue sent him home in December, citing what the front office called “differing styles.” His final on-court NBA appearance was December 1, 2025, against Miami: 8 points and 3 assists in 15 minutes in a 140–123 loss. Blake Griffin, his old Clippers teammate, went on ESPN the next week and said organizations should be built on a foundation of respect and this one wasn’t.
Toronto acquired him at the February 2026 trade deadline in a paper transaction. He never reported. The Raptors waived him on February 13, 2026. Six weeks later, on April 10, 2026, he posted a short message on Instagram that began “This is it!” and retired.
Legacy
The ring-less version of his career is a cleaner argument than people usually make. He played 21 seasons; he averaged a double-double (17.9 points, 9.2 assists) for his career; he shot .471 from the field, .370 from three, and .871 from the line; he is one of eight players with multiple steal titles and the only one with six; and in the single statistic that matters most for a point guard, his career assist-to-turnover ratio (4.01) is the highest of the modern era by a margin nobody’s closed. He also made every teammate he played with better at the specific skill of off-ball cutting and spacing. Blake Griffin’s career best two-point percentage came in his second year next to Paul. DeAndre Jordan’s free-throw shooting actually moved up during his Paul years, which was at least partly a willpower issue. Paul Millsap, in Denver, gave an interview once in which he said the thing he learned from Chris Paul in the 2008 Olympics was that you could yell at teammates all game as long as you also yelled at yourself harder.
He served as president of the National Basketball Players Association from August 2013 to August 2021, the longest continuous tenure of any player president. The banning of Donald Sterling from the league in 2014, after the recording of his racist remarks about Magic Johnson, is generally credited to him and Doc Rivers privately pushing Adam Silver within days of the story breaking. During COVID he organized the H-O-R-S-E tournament that ESPN broadcast in April 2020. He wrote Sixty One, finished his college degree at Winston-Salem State, and owns a piece of the minor-league Winston-Salem Dash. None of those are basketball résumé items. All of them are consistent with the point-guard who ran the 2008 Hornets.
He was thirtieth in The Athletic’s 2022 NBA 75 ranking. That is the ranking most of the ring-less argument hinges on. Thirty feels low to the people who watched him and about right to the people who weight championships. Which bucket you’re in probably tells you more about what you think basketball is than it tells you about Chris Paul.
Gear
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Sources
Primary source for the career line is the Basketball-Reference player page linked in the frontmatter. The 61-point high-school game and the details of Nathaniel Jones’s death are taken from Paul’s own 2023 memoir Sixty One, published by Simon & Schuster, which also provides the timeline of his Wake Forest decision. The April 10, 2026 retirement announcement is reported in NBA.com’s release of the same day. The “basketball reasons” memo around the 2011 Lakers veto was first reported by Marc Stein at ESPN on December 8, 2011. The NBA 75 ranking comes from The Athletic’s February 2022 series. Career milestones (10,000 assists, 20,000–10,000 club, 1,365 consecutive starts) are cross-referenced with NBA.com’s official player page and the league’s own record logs.
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Sources
- Basketball-Reference: Chris Paul
- NBA.com: "Chris Paul announces NBA retirement after 21 seasons" (April 10, 2026)
- Chris Paul, Sixty One: Life Lessons from Papa, On and Off the Court (Simon & Schuster, June 2023)
- The Athletic: "NBA 75: At No. 30, Chris Paul is the greatest point guard of his generation" (February 2022)
- ESPN: David Stern's "basketball reasons" memo and the 2011 Lakers veto