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BREAKING: Chris Paul is Really Good

Jason posted 5/22/2008 from ballhype.com

The Hornets fell just short of advancing to the Western Conference Finals, but Chris Paul's play was surely one of the highlights of the first two rounds. There's been a lot of talk about Paul's ascension to the NBA elite, and John Hollinger named him as his early playoffs MVP. In only his third season in the league, and at 22 years old (an age at which many of the all-time greats hadn't even begun their careers), Paul finished 2nd in MVP voting.

Given this, how much better can we expect CP3 to get? One way of guessing is to look at the careers of other NBA stars, as TZ ran a couple of weeks ago (spoiler alert: the title says that he has no ceiling). Here, I extracted a list of elite NBA players for comparison using data from basketball-reference.com. The list includes all players who achieved a Player Efficiency Rating (PER) of at least 20.0 through at least 820 minutes in at least 3 seasons over the past 50 years. 106 players fit that criteria, and here's the average PER by age for these stars:

The basic shape is of course what you would expect - young players improve, and old players decline. The average peak age is 27. As it turns out, you can slice this data in a number of ways with these stars but still end up with the same peak. Players who enter the league before they turn 21, players who enter the league after they turn 21, players shorter than 6'4", players taller than 6'8" ... all peak at just about the same time:

That's not to say that there aren't differences, though. As you can see from this chart, shorter star players are outperformed by taller stars on average for most of their careers, but the ones that last into their late 30's contribute more than aging giants. This height-performance trend applies to NBA players in general as well as the elite players, although John Stockton's efficiency at the later stages of his career was a big factor in this relatively small sample. Stockton's per-minute output was amazingly consistent throughout his 30's; he just played less as he got older.

Given that shorter players tend to have a tougher time posting big numbers, we'll first show the 6-footer Paul's career trajectory compared to other shorter stars. Here he is vs. other players from the list of 106 stars who are 6'1" or shorter:

Impressive. Compared to similarly-sized players, he's already better at age 22 than any of them hit at any point in their careers. Here he is against 6'2" players, ...

... and against 6'3" stars (Fat Lever and Sidney Moncrief missed full seasons due to injury--this is reflected in gaps in their lines):

In fact, only one NBA player shorter than 6'6" has ever posted a single season PER score higher than the 28.3 score that Paul achieved this year: Dwyane Wade, who hit 28.9 as a 25-year-old. Or maybe two, if you don't buy Charles Barkley's official height—he posted a 28.9 as a 27-year-old.

Perhaps even more impressive is the way that Paul stacks up against the taller greats. CP3 already has the 10th-higest career PER in the history of the league. Here are the top 10:

Looking at these numbers, it's easy to claim that he's off to a Jordanesque start in terms of overall production (as is LeBron, for that matter: believe the hype).

Finally, here's a tool you can use run your own PER comparisons among top NBA stars. Choose up to 5 different players from the select boxes to add them to the chart below. Some examples to get you started: [2003 draft], [1984 draft], [2008 Celtics], [all-time Grizzlies greats].