Paul has made the playoffs six times; he has led the league in postseason player efficiency rating in three of those six trips. His career playoff PER is 25.0. Here is the list of players who have logged at least 1,000 postseason minutes and exceeded that number: Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Shaquille O’Neal, Hakeem Olajuwon, George Mikan. That’s the list.
But PER is a surface stat that scans a player’s overall performance. No evaluation would end there. Paul’s best pre–Los Angeles team was the 2008 Hornets, a 56-win team that lost at home in Game 7 to the Spurs in the second round. That was the only close game of the series, and Paul put up 18 points, 14 assists, and eight rebounds before fouling out in the last seconds. He missed a layup with 45 seconds left that would have pulled the Hornets within three, but he also leaped between Ginobili and Tony Parker for an offensive rebound with about 1:30 left that he tipped right to Jannero Pargo for a triple that kept New Orleans alive.
Paul’s first-round series that season was a snoozer, but the final game was close, and Paul dispatched Dallas with a 24-15-11 triple-double that included an 11-point fourth quarter on 5-of-7 shooting.
He was hurt in the middle of the Denver series the next season, and when he got hurt again in 2010, the Hornets missed the playoffs. The next season, Paul averaged 22 points and 11.5 assists, hitting nearly 55 percent from the floor, in dragging a hopelessly undermanned Hornets team into a surprisingly competitive six-game series against the defending champion Lakers.
Injuries to Paul and his most important teammates have dotted his playoff career. Blake Griffin could barely play in the final two games of the Clippers’ first-round loss against Memphis two years ago due to a severe ankle sprain. Paul averaged 32 points per game on 22-of-40 shooting over the last two games of that series, but the Clippers without Griffin didn’t have enough to compete.
That series might have been over earlier had Paul not gone berserk in crunch time of Game 2, sinking 3-of-4 in the last 2:30, including a buzzer-beater to win the game.
That performance gave Memphis fans some nauseating flashbacks to the previous season, 2011-12, when Paul’s late-game play bordered on the implausible. He almost single-handedly won Game 4 of that first-rounder in overtime, slicing through for a layup with 26 seconds left in regulation to break a tie, and then raining fire with a 4-of-5 run of jumpers and leaners to clinch the game in overtime.
Paul had botched the final play of regulation in that game, failing to get a shot up under pressure from Tony Allen and others. It was an awful mistake, much like the comedy of errors that cost the Clippers in Game 5 against Oklahoma City last season.
Paul committed two more crucial late-game turnovers in Game 6 of that Clippers-Grizzlies series in 2012, melting under Allen’s hounding defense. He missed all of his shots in the fourth quarter of that game and again failed to make a single field goal in the fourth quarter of Game 7 two days later. The Clippers won, so no one remembers that.
Paul played through a hip flexor and a jammed finger during those playoffs, and he tossed away what was effectively a series-deciding turnover in the next round against San Antonio. The Spurs swept that series, so the turnover in Game 4 was inconsequential in the big picture.
Paul has generally done well in big moments. He has outshot almost every superstar in crunch time, and he's a tidy 18-36 in the last five minutes of playoff games in which the score has been within five points.
