Wemby, young Spurs step into professor Chris Paul’s classroom

Cam Johnson will never forget the time he saw Chris Paul read someone’s mind.

Telepathy transpired a couple of months into Johnson’s third NBA season, years after Paul had recovered from a supposed downswing to regain first-class status in the point-guard hierarchy. His Phoenix Suns were mired in a close game, down six to the Portland Trail Blazers and hoping to hamper one of the world’s sharpest shooters.

As Damian Lillard, an eight-time All-Star, initiated the play, Paul stepped up to him. Blazers center Jusuf Nurkić arrived to set a screen. Once Lillard maneuvered to his right, Paul anticipated the rest. He might have been the only one in the building who knew that a 30-point scorer would not look at the rim.

Lillard attempted to bounce a pass to Nurkić, but Paul’s left hand was in the way. He deflected the ball, dove into the 7-footer’s feet to recover it, then called a timeout.

As Paul strutted back to the Suns bench, he repeated the same phrase.

“You gotta watch!” he shouted, Johnson retells. “That’s why you gotta watch!”

Paul had studied Lillard enough to notice a trend. When the Portland guard veers to his right on a pick-and-roll, he wants to flip that bounce pass, not shoot. But this time, a hand beat him there.

This is the Paul way: Watch so much basketball that what’s coming next is not a guess; it’s darn near fortune-telling. He disagrees with analysts who condescend about “gambling” on defense, the ones who evaluate all jumps of passing lanes as equal, and believes he should have won a defensive player of the year award at some point during a 20-year career that’s included a record six steals titles and nine All-Defense appearances.

Some defenders play blackjack, he argues. Paul plays poker.

“We play too many games not to have tendencies,” Paul said.

It’s Paul’s mission to uncover them all — and not just for himself.

The defining characteristic of Paul’s legacy will be his basketball IQ. But especially during the second act of his career, Paul, 39, has become as notorious for imparting his knowledge to others, one of the reasons the youth-laden San Antonio Spurs, led by second-year phenom Victor Wembanyama, signed him this summer.

“He’s basically been coaching along with playing, very honestly,” coach Gregg Popovich said.

This is not new.

It wasn’t new when he taught Johnson the importance of tendencies or when he would correct the power forward if Johnson failed to position himself properly on defense.

“He gets so mad when you let somebody do what they wanna do,” Johnson said. “I (was guarding the lefty) Thad Young in the post, and I let him get back to his left hand. He was upset about that.”

This is what Paul does. He teaches, whether because someone is asking to learn or because another player isn’t paying close enough attention to the details and needs them placed into plain sight.

“When I see young guys who get this opportunity, I say not to throw it away — because I lived it, right?” Paul said. “Every guy is so excited when they get here to the league, most guys, majority of guys, because we’re .00000001 percent of (people) that have this opportunity, right? So just trying to tell them the things that I’ve learned.”

But this isn’t new.

It wasn’t new last season, when he played for the Golden State Warriors and taught Moses Moody how to pick up referee patterns. It wasn’t new in his previous stop, the one with the Suns, when he preached to fellow point guard Cameron Payne about the proper ways to run a team. 

Paul fixates on the micro. Those sneaky moves that only sticklers could come up with, the ones that leave him sprawled out on the court in front of giants like Nurkić — he teaches those, too.

In Phoenix, he helped mold eventual All-Defense wing Mikal Bridges, who is now better at guarding in transition because of Paul’s advice. If Paul can catch up to an opponent racing the other way on a fast break, he will give the dribbler a tap on one side of his body, making the offensive player believe that’s where Paul is positioned. Once the player crosses over, Paul steals it.

It’s the basketball equivalent of a 7-year-old tapping you on the far shoulder just to snark: Made you look.

“Like, that’s crazy,” Bridges said. “How do you even think of that while you’re in the game chasing somebody down? It’s just ridiculous. He’s so funny.”

Paul invented that move during his early playing days with the New Orleans Pelicans. And yet, his list of students is far from done.

During his one season with the Oklahoma City Thunder, he taught the core of what’s now a title contender how to watch film. While in the 2020 NBA bubble, he sat down Lu Dort daily, teaching the 6-foot-4 pest how to view defensive tape and changing the way Dort now studies for games.

He spent the same season altering the perspective of a young Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.

“He watches the game for a competitive advantage, as opposed to for pleasure or fun,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “He just told my eyes where to go.”

Don’t just stare at the ball, Paul would caution. Track all 10 players from a bird’s-eye view.

“I never really thought about that,” Gilgeous-Alexander said. “Like, watching it as a job.”

Paul’s tutelage has already begun in San Antonio. Only a few days ago, he warned rookie guard Stephon Castle about the dangers of sartorial sloppiness. If Castle checked in off the bench with his jersey untucked, he could be called for a delay of game, Paul told him, a niche rule Paul has exploited against opponents in the past.

This season, Paul has the opportunity to influence a roster featuring the reigning rookie of the year, Wembanyama. Eight players 25 or under — including Devin Vassell, Keldon Johnson, Jeremy Sochan and Tre Jones — could receive rotation minutes at different points throughout the year. Despite Wembanyama’s Year 1 magic, the Spurs won only 22 games in 2023-24, thanks to a season of experimentation and the lack of a starting-caliber point guard.

They believe Paul, who came off the bench for the Warriors a season ago, gives them one, even if he is no longer the prime-aged version of himself.

He doesn’t want to coach when he’s done; his eye is on ownership. And yet, to the Spurs, he’s not just an experienced point guard; he’s also a guide.

Paul has an obsession.

“I watch basketball all day,” he said.

He tries to watch every NBA game on the docket during nights his team does not play. When he’s on the road and without his home setup, he settles for a few games at a time, throwing a nationally televised one on the TV with another on his iPad. He brings his iPad to dinners, even ones with the family, propping it up on the table to stay in the know.

He doesn’t write down notes; instead, he files away the information in a brain overflowing with observations.

He seeks out others who are like him.

“There’s usually a coach on every staff that’s just as crazy about it as me,” Paul said.

While in New Orleans, that coach was Michael Malone, an assistant for the Pelicans at the time who is now head coach of the 2023 champion Denver Nuggets. When games the two were not participating in came down to the wire, Malone would call Paul or vice versa. Neither required confirmation that they were watching the same thing. Instead, they would immediately begin sharing predictions about what play the offense was about to run. Monty Williams, Paul’s former coach with the Pels and Suns, would text him to spitball in similar scenarios.

A constant feed of basketball means Paul doesn’t feel the need to load up on scouting heading into games. Before facing an opponent, he will log onto Second Spectrum, a wide-ranging database with film and stats, to study every shot his upcoming assignment has taken over the previous five games. He won’t watch more than that. After all, he isn’t looking for tendencies; he already knows those. Instead, he’s hoping to lock in on an intangible: confidence.

“If you’re playing against a guy who don’t shoot it a lot and all this stuff, but if you look at his last five games, and he’s 8 for 12 from 3 or whatnot, that’s gonna let you know the first time they drive and kick to him, he’s gonna let it fly,” Paul said.

Paul can’t remember thinking about the sport in another way.

He credits a childhood AAU coach, Andy Poplin, for opening his mind early. When Paul was only 11, his team would deploy complex strategies, such as the flex offense, a 1-2-2 press or more advanced pick-and-roll sets. One play they ran routinely was “Utah,” a high pick-and-roll named after the Jazz’s iconic John Stockton-Karl Malone connection.

“It’s almost like a kid learning how to play chess when they’re 4, 5 years old,” Paul said.

Paul became a grand master.

“Even at that time, he was a coach on the floor,” Poplin said. “He would get people in the right places and get people in their spots, be slightly irritated when they didn’t get to their spots. He was just a competitor. … You got a point guard that can organize the team. That’s just unheard of at that age.”

Paul is at the behest of a routine.

Three hours before any game, he is on the court alone during an era when solo workouts are less common. Shooting around alone is therapeutic for him. “Like when I was a kid,” he said.

He’s only added structure since those days.

He’s a vegan now. His food intake is regimented, one of the reasons he’s lasted for two decades in the NBA and maintained All-Star status into his late 30s. Johnson remembers that Phoenix team security would travel with Paul’s snacks, just in case.

“Everything is efficient,” Johnson said.

That’s efficiency in food, efficiency in work, efficiency on the court, efficiency in life.

He goes for the throat in board games. He is such a diehard cards player that Payne, who overlapped with Paul in Phoenix, would refuse to open a deck with him when they were teammates.

“He needs to win,” Payne said. “Uno, spades, don’t matter. He is the greatest competitor.”

Not everyone chooses as wisely as Payne does.

Paul counts cards in spades, said Josh Okogie, a longtime mentee who played with Paul in Phoenix and came up through the point guard’s AAU program in North Carolina. Paul remains in love with grassroots basketball. Various NBA players — Okogie, Grant Williams, Coby White, Collin Sexton and Wendell Carter Jr. to name only some — rose through his AAU program.

“He’s a maniac. He’s very statistical with everything,” Okogie said before pausing for effect. “Everything!”

That includes Monopoly.

When Paul plays, he will zero in on whichever property his opponent needs most, then make sure to trade for it and hold it ransom, according to Williams, who has now stolen the strategy.

“He’s obviously a ‘by-any-means’ type of guy,” Moody said.

Of course, that type of guy isn’t for everyone.

Payne’s first season alongside Paul, one that helped the Suns to the NBA Finals, was his best — and not by coincidence. With his NBA career on life support less than a year before joining Phoenix, Payne understood the best way to stick in the league: Soak up whatever information Paul was willing to share.

This was a Ph.D. in being a PG.

The first lesson Paul taught Payne was how to “take over the huddle,” as Payne puts it. When the Suns returned to the bench during a timeout, it was the point guard’s job to tell each of his teammates what he saw before the coach spoke.

“He talked his ass off. That’s one thing. Like, he talked his ass off,” Payne said. “Sometimes as young guys, you don’t want to hear that, but he has great knowledge, so you pay attention.”

Not everyone does. For some, Paul’s intensity is too much, his expectations too high. But Payne locked in.

As he improved, more questions came. He recognized that when Paul ventured around pick-and-rolls, a passing lane to his screener always seemed to be open. How, he wondered?

“Score yourself,” Paul told Payne. “That’s how it opens up.” Once you make the defense guard the threat of a bucket, the pass becomes easier.

Paul wouldn’t yell at Payne, instead taking the tone of a disappointed older sibling after mistakes. At times, when Payne messed up and Paul knew the fellow guard already understood what he did wrong, he would calmly repeat variations of the same phrase. Payne can still rattle off the impression, reaching a slightly higher, breather tenor to mimic the elder statesman: “‘C’mon, Cam. C’mon, man. Cam, c’mon.”

Now, Paul can speak the same way to Wembanyama and Castle, to Vassell and Jones. The Spurs have a starting point guard to leave vegan breadcrumbs for anyone behind him.

“There has been a mentorship dynamic with everybody because Chris is Chris,” Popovich said. “His experience and his intelligence, as we know, is off the charts. … He talks to everybody on the court: big, little. (He’s) just been fantastic in that regard.”

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photo: Glenn James, Megan Briggs / Getty Images)