Confessions of a Hater

On Chris Paul, the importance of sports-hating, and more

Whether you’ve been with me for a few days or a few years, you’ve noticed (I hope) that the constant thread linking all my writing is a love of basketball. Playing, watching, talking, and writing about it has led to virtually everything good in my life. I delight in the game, the small and the big, quite earnestly. A lot of writers, podders, YouTubers, etc. have made a name for themselves with sarcasm or screaming or deprecation, sometimes at face value, sometimes disguised as “truth-telling”; that ain’t me, perhaps to a fault.

But for my entire basketball-watching life, I’ve had one exception, a player whose every move rubbed me the way a dog-lover rubs a cat: Cliff Paul’s evil twin.

The Clippers banished Chris Paul from the team in the middle of the night a few days ago. The public outcry would have you thinking he was on life support.

Yes, it’s bad optics for a team struggling so badly to discard the one guy seemingly trying to light a fire under them. It’s bad optics to do so in such an ungracious, abrupt manner, particularly coming as it did just weeks after Paul announced his forthcoming retirement. It’s bad optics to take out the best player in franchise history with a cheap shot in the dark. And I do feel for the LA fans out there who treasure Paul for reinventing and legitimizing what had been the saddest sack in the league.

But that doesn’t mean the decision was wrong. Los Angeles employs a bunch of players and coaches who have done a whole lot of winning, some more than Paul himself. Constant beratement by the worst player on the team was unlikely to do much good. The front office decided that his ceaseless harassment was hurting the team more than it was helping, so they told him to pack his bags after what must’ve been an excruciating three-hour late-night meeting (thanks to a plane delay). And Leonard, Lue, Harden, and company sure did look like they were trying to prove a point by thrashing the Hawks right after banishing Paul (which, hilariously, sort of proves Paul right).

This is a team that cannot afford more distractions. Every loss makes it likelier they give up a top pick to the OKC Thunder, and nobody outside of Sooner country wants that. The process was terrible, in unclassic old Clippers fashion, but it was probably the right choice if things were as toxic as they sound.

You wouldn’t know it from social media. The Internet is awash in posts bemoaning the Clippers’ cowardice. How dare they do this to a franchise legend, Is anyone softer than [Kawhi Leonard/James Harden/Ty Lue/Lawrence Frank/all of the above], Think of the farewell tour, etc., etc.

I’m a little bemused by public reaction to this. I’m old enough to have seen the whole CP3 cycle, from universal love for the athletic, blink-quick assassin in New Orleans, to nearly universal mocking for repeated nut-punchings and failures on the highest stages (CP3 will end his career sober!), to the whiplash back the other way to universal love for a player who aged so gracefully right up until he didn’t.

Paul is one of the best point guards of all time. He was the first NBA player to reach 20K points and 10K career assists. He led the league in steals six times and in assists five. 11x All-NBA, 9x All-Defensive. Despite several high-profile miscues, he repeatedly graded out as one of the clutchest players in the league, snaking around a pick to that same right-side elbow jumper every time.

This is a man who got an opponent T’d up for not tucking in his shirt.

I believe Paul’s bum hamstring stopped the Moreyball Rockets from upsetting the Durant Warriors back in 2018. Paul has been involved in so many major what-ifs. Most were injury-related; some (like his rescinded trade to the Lakers) weren’t his fault; some were.

Paul is indisputably one of the all-time greats, an inflection point in so much of the league’s history (including his work as president of the Player’s Association for eight years). There’s no debating his excellence. But sports hate isn’t really about the quality of player. In fact, you can’t muster up that depth of emotion for anyone but the stars. They need to be worthy of your hatred.

When writing this, I’d originally listed a bunch of reasons why Chris Paul deserved your scorn, too, but truthfully, they aren’t germane. If you’re reading this, you’re likely a sports fan. You almost certainly have someone you sports-hate; if you wrote down your justifications, would they bear up to impartial scrutiny?¹ I don’t want to get into an argument in the comments with the apparently plentiful Chris Paul stans. I’ve got a 20+ year hating relationship; you won’t change my mind, and I doubt I’d change yours.

But to see that relationship — my relationship — end like this, via an Instagram message in the middle of the night, is bittersweet. Initial instinct:

But then I think about all the times I’ve smiled when something bad happened to Paul. How happy I was for his failures (excluding the injuries, which saddened me because I always want to see the best basketball possible. Chris Paul couldn’t flame out in more spectacular ways if he was in street clothes!).

I wonder: Will I ever feel this way again? Is it possible to find your reverse-soulmate twice?

Unlike in real life, in sports, hate doesn’t have the same depth of emotion as love. Ask anyone for their fondest sports-viewing memories, and they will give you a list of individual players or teams they liked triumphing. Nobody mentions the many, many times their least favorite player didn’t win a championship.

But that’s the funny thing about sports-hate: It’s a more reliable generator of good feelings than rooting for a team. Most, perhaps the vast majority, of NBA fans end the season disappointed in their team. But while triumphs and championships are rare, the flip side means that if you’re rooting against someone, you’ll end the season satisfied far more often than not. Mathematically speaking, there’s a consistency to it that cheering for your favorites can’t reach.

Maybe it makes me a bad person, but every time I saw Paul angrily stalking off the court, fake smiles and fake fights and all, I really felt a warm candle’s flicker of satisfaction.

Paul may wind up catching on with another team. I’m not sure who’d have interest in a slippery-when-wet sign shooting 32% from the field, but the name brand still has a whiff of leathery cachet to it. Maybe someone will fall for it, but right now, it’s hard to see who. This could be the end for Chris Paul, and the end of my one true sports hatred. A piece of me — not my favorite piece, to be clear, but a real one — is missing. I’m not entirely sure how to feel.

…

…

Actually, nah. Forget all that. It feels f*cking great! Get out of here, Chris Paul, and I hope your grocery bags rip the next time you carry your organic produce up the stairs.

1. I did, and mine would. I’m 99% sure.