Is Chris Paul the NBA's unluckiest superstar?
— -- Chris Paul's frustration was evident as the LA Clippers guard walked off the court after injuring his left thumb during a win over the Oklahoma City Thunder. While Paul's injury (a torn ligament that will require surgery and keep him out six to eight weeks, as the team announced Tuesday) wasn't yet diagnosed, he knew that yet again he was going to be sidelined while he was playing some of his best basketball.
TNT's broadcast crew of Kevin Harlan and Reggie Miller recognized the emotion, which included Paul kicking at a chair -- they'd seen it last year, when Paul broke his right hand during Game 4 of the Clippers' first-round series against the Portland Trail Blazers. Without Paul and fellow All-Star Blake Griffin, the Clippers lost to the Blazers in six games, bringing their postseason to an early end yet again.
While Paul should be back from his latest injury in plenty of time for the playoffs, it still could prove costly for the Clippers in terms of seeding. Given his track record of untimely injuries and short playoff runs, is Paul the NBA's unluckiest superstar?
Impact of Paul's injury
Despite playing the second half without Paul, the Clippers went on to defeat Oklahoma City 120-98 for their seventh consecutive win. The outcome brought the Clippers to 27-9 this season when they have had Paul, who missed seven games earlier with a strained hamstring.
While some of that discrepancy is attributable to the Clippers' relatively weak second unit, ESPN's real plus-minus (RPM) -- which seeks to adjust for teammates and opponents -- still rates Paul as having the NBA's biggest on-court impact so far this season, 9.3 points per 100 possessions better than a league-average player.
Even with Griffin returning soon from arthroscopic knee surgery, the Clippers are likely to feel Paul's absence. Remarkably, the multiyear version of RPM projects the Clippers as a below-.500 team (38 wins over a full season) without Paul (and with Griffin) because of the drop-off to backups Austin Rivers (minus-3.1 multiyear RPM) and Raymond Felton (minus-1.8).
The Clippers were able to go 12-6 without Paul when he missed 18 games due to a separated shoulder during the 2013-14 season, his last extended absence. Griffin averaged 27.5 points and 4.4 assists per game during that stretch, production that might not be realistic as he comes back from his own injury.
If L.A. indeed plays like a 38-win team over the next seven weeks, that would cost the Clippers nearly three wins on average -- enough to decrease their chances of getting home court in the first round of the playoffs from 71 percent of simulations using ESPN's Basketball Power Index to 24 percent of simulations using the modified estimate. That, in turn, makes it more likely the Clippers would get knocked out in the opening round of the playoffs for a second straight year -- now about a 50-50 proposition according to the simulations.
History of playoff heartbreak
Another early playoff exit would be a bitter pill for Paul, who has famously never gotten so far as the conference finals in his career. Two years ago, when the Clippers were within a game of the conference finals before losing to the Houston Rockets, I found that Paul had already racked up more career wins above replacement player (WARP) by my metric than any player not to reach the conference finals since the NBA began tracking player turnovers in 1977-78.
Paul's past season and a half have added another 25 WARP to his total, giving him 36 more than the next-best player on the list, Hall of Famer Dominique Wilkins.
Let's consider this question another way. Given Paul's play, how many conference finals would we expect him to have made? Using a similar method to my championships added analysis, I looked at how often players have made the conference finals since the playoffs took their current 16-team format in 1984 as compared to their regular-season WARP totals. Then I found the exponential curve that best predicts the chances.
Based on that history, the chances of a player's team making the conference finals when he posts 24 WARP, as Paul did in 2007-08 with the New Orleans Hornets, are about 50-50 (those Hornets, like Paul's 2015 Clippers, fell one game short of the conference finals). Meanwhile, there's about a 10 percent chance of a player's team making the conference finals simply by random luck of the draw, even if he provides zero WARP.
Going through Paul's career, we'd expect him to have made 3.7 conference finals thus far. His actual total of zero is, naturally, the largest discrepancy since 1977-78.
Hardest-luck superstar?
It's tough to say exactly what constitutes bad luck for a player. There are plenty of superstars who have had their careers cut short due to injury, and Paul's injuries haven't affected his long-term availability or his performance to date. And a handful of times, Paul has participated in his team's playoff demise, most famously with his late turnover in a devastating loss in Game 5 of the Clippers' 2014 conference semifinals series against the Oklahoma City Thunder.
Still, as Paul moped toward the locker room Monday night, it was hard not to empathize with him. Another bad break could make it that much more difficult for Paul to enjoy the deep playoff run that has eluded him for so long.
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